If you are like me (and thousands of other users) then I am quite certain that you do not save your documents, spreadsheets, presentation in the My Documents folder on your computer. There is nothing wrong in doing that. But we just don't do it. At homes we like to create a folder by our names and then save in our stuff in there and in office we all have been allocated a home drive and / or a shared folder on the network drive. Saving your stuff in the My Documents and it's sub folders makes sense if you are the only one who will be accessing it. Like your tax records or personal information. In a situation where you have to share it with many people, it makes sense to store it in a common location.

How many times do you have to open or save a file in that particular location and always have to navigate to that location. If that location is on the network and network is slow, then it probably takes forever to navigate to that location. Here I offer a way to reduce the amount of time it takes to navigate and save files by adding the location in the "Places" tool bar in Windows. In the open and save dialog boxes, Windows provides a "Places" bar located vertically on the left hand side of the window.

If you are using Office XP or 2003:

1. Navigate to the location (folder) that you want to add to the Places bar.
2. Click on the tools menu on the right hand side top corner, and click on Add to My Places

If you are using Office 2007 Beta2:

1. Navigate to the location (folder) that you want to add to the places bar
2. Right click on the Places toolbar itself and click on "Add folder_name".

All the context sensitive functions (by right click) like rename, remove work for these shortcuts as well so you can choose to remove it or rename it if you wish.

The folder will start appearing in the Places tool bar in all office location from the next time. Once you have done that, you can export the registry keys from the registry in case you have to reformat the computer or move to a new location. The registry key is located at:

For Office XP

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces

For Office 2003

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces

For Office 2007

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces