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Customize the Open Dialog Place Bar in Office 2000

On the left side of the Office 2000 File Open dialog box are icons for five locations where Microsoft assumes you want to keep your files. How can I customize these choices to add the folders that I want to have there?

Brad Williams Victoria, British Columbia

This is so typically shortsighted of Microsoft. It gives you a handy feature that absolutely requires customization to be useful, and then it doesn't tell you how you can customize it!

To change what Microsoft calls the Place Bar (see FIGURE 1), you have to edit the Registry. As usual, you should back up the Registry first (for instructions on doing this, see May's Answer Line ).

Note: Before you start editing the Registry, close all Office applications.

When you're ready, select Start, Run, type regedit, and press Enter to bring up the Registry Editor. Navigate in the left pane to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Open Find\Places\StandardPlaces.

The dialog box allows you to display only five place icons, so for every one you want to add, you must hide one of Microsoft's defaults. (Later I'll show you how to outwit this requirement.) Beneath StandardPlaces you'll find a key for every icon on the Place Bar. Right-click on one for an icon you don't want, and select New, DWORD value. Name the value show, and leave it with its default value of 0. Repeat this procedure for every icon you want to hide.

Once you've hidden a few folder icons, you're ready to create new ones. Right-click the UserDefinedPlaces key under Places, and then select New, Key. Give the key any name you wish.

Right-click the new key and select New, String Value. Name this value name. Press Enter, type in an appropriate name, and press Enter again.

Right-click the key again and select New, String Value. Call this one path; for the text string, enter the full path to the folder. For instance, if you want a shortcut to your Alternate Docs folder on your D: drive (as in Figure 1), your name value might be Alternate Docs and your path value D:\Alternate Docs.

There's a way to get around the dialog box's five-folder limit. Right-click the Places key and select New, DWORD Value. Name the new value ItemSize and leave it with the default value of 0. The folder icons will be smaller, and you'll be able to fit more of them in the dialog box, as shown in the right-hand panel of Figure 1.