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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Most shortcuts just launch programs, but there's another kind that's much more powerful


Jan 1 , 2001

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2001 Al Fasoldt

   When I was a kid I usually cut through the yard behind my house on the way home from school. It saved me a long walk around the block.
   I have the same habit today, five decades later. I cut corners and take shortcuts each time I use my computer. You do too, even if you don't realize it.
   Every modern computer operating system has shortcuts. Sometimes they are called other names -- "aliases" is what they are called on the Apple Macintosh, for example -- but they all work the same basic way. They give your computer and your programs a quick path to things that might be hard to get to otherwise.
   Shortcuts are wonderful inventions. Why should you click a zillion times to get from one folder to another many levels deep in your computer's file system? If you make a shortcut to that far-away folder or file, you can put the shortcut right where you can reach it -- on your desktop, maybe.
   That's the basic idea. But I'm going to show you something that will make shortcuts much more powerful.
   In fact, I have a hunch that what I'm about to tell you could be one of the most important tips you'll ever read, whether you're using Windows, a Mac or a Linux PC.
   Let me explain.
   Have you ever suffered though the frustration of ending up in the wrong file location every time you want to do something on your computer? I'll give you an example from my own use of Windows.
   I use Microsoft Word at the office. Among other things, I create office newsletters in Word. I write a new one every week. They have helpful advice, tips and tricks. (No, you can't get copies of my newsletters. They're just for the staff here at the newspaper. But the Windows tips that appear in those newsletters end up in these columns, too.)
   Each newsletter has a couple of illustrations. These are image files stored on my hard drive. I create them and put them in the folder called My Documents.
   So far, so good, right?
   Wrong. For its own reasons, Microsoft Word thinks all the illustrations anyone would ever want to place in Word documents are stored in another place. Every time I click the menu item that lets me place an image in a newsletter, Microsoft Word opens a folder called Clipart.
   The images I want to use are in My Documents. They are not in Clipart, wherever that is. (All you see is a folder in the Microsoft Word file-browsing window. The folder's name is Clipart. Where it's located isn't shown.)
   Right away I want to tell all the smart Word users out there that yes, I do know how to change the defaults in Microsoft Word. I do know how to force Word to look in My Documents instead of Clipart for images.
   But I don't want to do that. I'm not using my own copy of Microsoft Word. I'm using the one that belongs to somebody else, my employer. I don't want to change the default file locations.
   Besides, I have a much easier way. I use a shortcut.
   The shortcut isn't on my Desktop. Most Windows users who make shortcuts put them on the Desktop.
   Bad idea. A Desktop shortcut, for my purposes, would be pointless. When Microsoft Word opens its default folder for images, I don't want to navigate clear back to my Desktop just to use a shortcut that points someplace else.
   With me so far? Can you tell where my shortcut is located?
   It's in the Clipart folder. Since Microsoft Word always opens the Clipart folder when I am trying to get it to insert an image into my newsletter, I decided it was easier to switch than fight. I made the first item in the Clipart folder a shortcut to My Documents. (How did I make sure it's the first item in the Clipart folder? I named the shortcut 1 My Documents. Numbers come before letters in alphabetical order, so my shortcut will be first in the list as long as nothing else in the folder starts with a "1.")
   This makes my work a lot easier, since the first thing I see in the Microsoft Word file-browsing window is the 1 My Documents shortcut in the Clipart folder. All I have to do is click on the shortcut and I'm taken immediately to the folder called My Documents.
   In other words, the shortcut served as a detour. You probably think of shortcuts as icons that launch programs. That's OK. It's what most of them do. But the real power of shortcuts in Windows, the Mac and Linux is how they can represent folders. They can take you directly from one place to another on the computer. They can be "tunnels" through the mountain of files and folders on your hard drive. Like every tunnel I've ever driven through, folder shortcuts start out in one place and end up in another, close by or a long distance away.
   Don't let my example of Microsoft Word confuse you. Folder shortcuts can be used in hundreds of ways.
   Suppose you have a photo scanner. The files it creates are located in a folder deep inside another folder that is itself deep within a main folder. (That's exactly how my scanner is set up, so you can guess that I'm describing this from my own experience.)
   The main folder is called Program Files. The folder where the scanner program is located inside Program Files is called, in my case, Paper Port. The folder inside THAT folder where stuff is stored is called Data. And inside Data are other folders. And inside them -- well, you get the point.
   Is this a problem? Not if you don't have a life. If you don't mind spending two or three minutes every time you scan something trying to locate your files through layer after layer of folder windows, this is no problem at all. But if, like me, you want to be able to get real work done in the current decade, you surely don't want to take the long way around the block when you can cut through somebody's back yard.
   And that's just what a folder shortcut does for you. It provides a fast route from where you are to where you want to be. It takes you right to that location through the Windows file-and-folder browser called Explorer. (Yes, it's related to Internet Explorer, but it's just called Windows Explorer.)
    Many experienced Windows users would create a shortcut on the Desktop to that Data folder. That would let them go directly to the folder in Explorer without going down level by level. But would this help out? Not really. It would open the distant folder in a window, but it wouldn't help get the file-browsing problem fixed.
   You remember the real problem I was having with Microsoft Word? It wasn't that the folder I wanted to use was a million clicks away. It was that it just plain was out of reach. I fixed that by making a shortcut to that folder inside the folder that Word opened up when I wanted to work with an image.
   So that's the solution to the scanner dilemma. A shortcut on the Desktop wouldn't help at all. What's needed is a shortcut inside the folder that the scanner software opens by default.
   All you have to do is look at the folder shown by default in the file-browsing window. If it's not where you really want to be, make a shortcut to the location you want to go to and put the shortcut right there, in the default folder opened by the file browser. Windows makes this easy: Just open the file-browsing window and click your right mouse button inside it. Choose New, then Shortcut. Type the location of the folder to create the shortcut, making sure that you use the naming trick I told you about earlier. (Items that start with numbers appear before items that start with letters.)
   You can do the same kind of thing all over the place. You can put folder shortcuts at every juncture, in every important folder. On my home network, all three Windows PCs have a folder named -Aliases (yes, with a hyphen at the front) in the main section, or "root," of the C: drive. Because of the way that folder is spelled, it's always at the top of the list of folders, and always shows up in a file-browsing window. Inside the -Aliases folder is -- you guessed it -- a bunch of folder shortcuts. They point to locations all over the network, and all three -Aliases folders have the same shortcuts. If I'm doing image editing on Computer A, I can quickly get to a folder called Grandchildren on Computer B just by clicking the Grandchildren folder shortcut in the -Aliases folder. On Computer B, I can get to a folder on Computer C where image-enhancing programs are stored by clicking the Image Enhancers folder shortcut in the -Aliases folder on Computer B.
   In other words, it doesn't matter where things are as long as you can get to them through shortcuts. The best location for some shortcuts is the Desktop. But for Windows folder shortcuts, the ideal location is often somewhere else -- in the default folder locations that programs open when you use file-open and file-save browsing windows. When you use them that way, folder shortcuts become tunnels that take you right to the place you wanted to go.