Are you one of those people who has to manage a large number of documents in various assorted places on your hard drive?  Maybe you have dozens of folders inside of your My Documents directory or somewhere else, easier to get to with VSS.  Have you ever been frustrated by the Open dialog in MS Word or Excel – you keep having to drill down to your various different directories starting from your My Documents directory?  This can especially be a pain in the neck when you have networked drives mapped on your machine – that seems to make your machine slow to a crawl when using the location pull down.

Finally some help – Microsoft has built in a My Places list of shortcuts you can use in your Open and Save dialogs.  I’m sure you’ve seen it before:

You can add to the My Places shortcut list.  First you want to set the current list to display with small icons.  Then you use the Open dialog to drill down to your preferred folder.  Once you’re inside of the folder you want to see in your shortcut list, use the Tools menu to add to My Places.  Finally, by right-clicking on the new entry, you can move it to the position you want it in the list.  Simple stuff like this is what I love about Windows!

-- Matt Ranlett