Customizing the Office Common Dialog Boxes

When you display the Open or Save As dialog boxes in any Office application, the left side of the dialog box holds a strip of icons called My Places. There are five icons in the default configuration: My Recent Documents, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places. Clicking any of these icons places the corresponding folder in the Look In (or Save In) list and displays the folder contents in the dialog box.

This is handy behavior, and it gets even handier when you customize the My Places bar to include the folders that you use most often. You can also change the order of the icons and remove icons, as explained in the next few sections.

Adding a Folder to the My Places Bar

Follow these steps to add a folder to My Places:

1.	In any Office application, select File, Open to display the Open dialog box. (You can also select File, Save As to display the Save As dialog box.)
2.	Open the folder you want to add to My Places.
3.	Drop down the Tools menu and select the Add to "My Places" command. Office adds the folder to My Places.

Figure 10.7 shows the Open dialog box with a folder named Conference Files added to My Places.

Figure 10.7. You can add your own folders to the My Places bar that is part of the Office Open and Save As dialog boxes.

Customizing the My Places Bar Icons

Here are a few useful techniques that enable you to customize the My Places bar:

• Keeping the icons in view If you add more icons than can fit in the default height of the My Places bar, Office displays arrows at the bottom and/or top of the My Places bar to enable you to scroll down or up. One way to avoid this is to increase the height of the dialog box itself. Another method is to switch to smaller versions of the icons. To do that, right-click any icon in the My Places bar and then click Small Icons.

• Changing the icon order If you have some icons that you use frequently, you might prefer to place them nearer the top of the list. You can change the position of an icon in the My Places bar by right-clicking the icon and then clicking either Move Up or Move Down.

• Renaming custom icons You can rename the folder icons that you add to My Places. To do this, right-click the icon, click Rename, type the new name into the Rename Place dialog box, and then click OK.

Removing Icons from the My Places Bar

If you find that your My Places bar is getting overcrowded, you should delete any icons you no longer use. You can delete a custom icon by right-clicking it and then clicking Remove.

For the built-in icons, removing them involves editing the Windows Registry. (See Appendix A, "Working with the Windows Registry.") Open the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places\ StandardPlaces\ 

Here you see five subkeys: Desktop, MyComputer, MyDocuments, Publishing, and Recent. These correspond to the five built-in folder icons in the default My Places bar. (The Publishing key corresponds to the My Network Places icon.) Follow these steps to remove a built-in icon from My Places:

1.	Click the key that corresponds to the icon you want to remove.
2.	Select Edit, New, DWORD Value. The Registry Editor creates a new DWORD value in the key.
3.	Type Show and press Enter.

Note that the default setting for a new DWORD value is 0, which is what we want. That is, when you add the Show value and set it to 0, Office doesn't display the corresponding icon in My Places. In Figure 10.8, for example, I've added the Show value to the Desktop key. As you can see in Figure 10.9, the Desktop icon no longer appears in the My Places bar.

Figure 10.8. To remove a built-in icon from My Places, add the Show value to the corresponding key and set the value to 0, as shown here for the Desktop key.

Figure 10.9. The Desktop icon no longer appears in the My Places bar.

If you change your mind, either change the Show value to 1 or delete the Show value.

From Here

• To learn how to create macros, see Chapter 11, "Maximizing Office with VBA Macros."

• For some examples of macros that you can assign to menu commands and toolbar buttons, see Chapter 12, "Putting VBA to Good Use: Practical Macros Everyone Can Use."

• To learn how to use the Registry Editor, see Appendix A, "Working with the Windows Registry."