Making It Easy to Open Your Favorite Documents In Windows XP


When Microsoft introduced the My Documents folder in Windows 98, many longtime computer users with roots in MS-DOS and the earliest versions of Windows objected determinedly. Aside from the name, which some found rendering, they didn’t want to be told where to store their documents. (By the way, you can change the name of My Documents in the same way that you change the name of any other folder: Right-click and choose Rename.) But the implementation of My Documents has been greatly improved in subsequent versions of Windows, and it provides the easiest and best place to organize and store your documents.

Its advantages include the following:

● Windows gives you simple access to the My Documents folder during the Start menu, the task pane in Windows Explorer, general File Open and File Save dialog boxes etc.

● Using My Documents creates it easy to share the documents you desire to share and keep private the ones you don’t desire to share (mainly if you use Windows XP Home Edition, in which it’s difficult to change the default share permissions and NTFS permissions).

● Keeping your documents in My Documents and its subfolders creates it much easier to back up your documents or move them to another computer en masse. Gathering your documents from their distant locations all over your drive is a necessary first step in developing a practical backup strategy.

Obviously, you’re still free to store your documents where you desire, but there’s really no reason is use to My Documents. Clicking a link to My Documents—and you’ll see many of them in Windows XP—leads you directly to your document storage location, where you can open your document of choice with a simple double-click.

To access documents that you allocate with others, any of in the Shared Documents folder or in a folder on a network drive, easily makes a shortcut to the shared folder in you’re my Documents folder. That way My Documents becomes the single access point for all your documents—private, shared nearby, and shared on the network.

Many programs, by default, store the documents they create in a folder other than My Documents. If the program allows it, override those defaults! For example, unless you use roaming user profiles, move your Outlook Express message store to My Documents. (In Outlook Express, click Tools, Options, Maintenance, Store Folder, Change.)