As I’ve noted in the past, I don’t put anything into the My Documents folder. However, the other day, my husband (the nerd) pointed out a good use for it. Because many programs go to My Documents by default, you can save yourself quite a bit of mousing around if you put a shortcut to another folder inside the My Documents folder.
For example, I keep my project files in a folder on my D drive called Proj (short for Projects and a left-over from the DOS days of short folder names). In any case, no software product has any interest in going to that folder, much less the D drive. So I put a shortcut to D:Proj inside my My Documents folder.
Here’s how you do it:
1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the My Documents folder.
2. Right-click and choose New and then Shortcut. The Shortcut Wizard appears.
3. Click the Browse button and find your folder (in my case D:Proj). Click the Next button.
4. Give your shortcut a name (I called mine Proj Folder, for example).
5. Click OK to exit the wizard.
Now, when I go to open a file, I can click the My Documents icon in the Places bar along the side of the Open dialog box. Within My Documents, I then click my cute new Proj Folder shortcut, which immediately shows me all the subfolders that live in my favorite projects folder.
I can see other ways to use this trick as well. For example, I am tired of Word’s insistence on going to My Data Sources whenever I do a mail merge. So I created a shortcut within My Data Sources that points to where my merge data files actually are. Along the same lines, I created a shortcut in the My Pictures folder that takes me to the location of my digital camera files. So now I have the best of both worlds. I can put my files where I want them and have quick access to them as well.