Windows Forum

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Clarification Of Artical

0 helpful
3 replies

by cmtbob

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I received the follow tip in a techrepublic W2K newsletter but after following the instructions it did not work. Can someone verify the info.
Thanks
Bob

Modify the Places Bar, part 2

The Places Bar appears at the left of the Open dialog boxgenerated by the ComDlg32.dll library. The Places Bar includes icons for the History, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places folders, making it easy to open documents in these common folders.
The Places Bar can contain up to five icons. The registry values that reference these icons and their associated folders are named Place0 through Place4. Adding your own folders to the Places Bar is, therefore, a relatively simple matter of creating these five entries in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32\Placesbar key.

You can reference folders either by their absolute path string or the system ID for the folder. Using the string is best for folders that don't change location based on current logon and for nonsystem folders.
To add a folder, open the Registry Editor and open the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32\Placesbar key. Right-click in the right pane and choose New | String Value. Name the value Place0 and set its value to the path to the desired folder. For example, you might enter C:\Docs\Personal to add that folder to your Places Bar.

To add a system folder to the Places Bar, right-click in the right pane and choose New | DWORD Value. Set the name to Place1 and set the value to the ID for the folder.

Repeat the steps to add values for Place2 through Place4. Open a standard Windows 2000 accessory application, choose File | Open, and verify that your folders are correct. You can adjust or correct values as needed.

3 replies

by still_learning

This was part 2 of a 2 part article. Did you perfom the steps in part 1?

When you choose File | Open in most Windows 2000 applications, Windows
2000 uses a standard Open dialog box generated by Comdlg32.dll. One aspect
of the Open dialog box isthe Places Bar at the left edge of the dialog
box. The Places Bar, by default, includes icons for the History, My
Documents, Desktop, My Computer, and My Network Places folders. The Places Bar
makes it easy to open documents stored in those common folders.

If you often work from other folders, it can take a little browsing to
get to the location you need. Windows 2000 doesn't provide a means in the
GUI to customize the Places Bar, but you can modify the Places Bar
manually by modifyingthe registry. Once you've modified the Places Bar, you'll
enjoy those modifications for all Windows 2000 applications that use
Comdlg32.dll to generate the Open dialog box.

The first step in modifying the Places Bar is to create a registry keyto contain the custom settings. The key doesn't exist by default, and
creating it causes the Places Bar to be empty initially, but you'll fill it
up shortly. To create the necessary key, open the Registry Editor and
create
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32\Placesbar.
You'll need to create the ComDlg32 subkey and then the Placesbar subkey. To
verify that your key is correct, open Notepad and choose File | Open. The Places
Bar should now be empty. In part two, you'll learn how to fill the Places Bar again.

NOTE: As always, we'll remind you that editing the registry can be
risky, so be sure you have a verified backup before making any changes.

by cmtbob

On further review I realized that it does work for notepad. I was looking in word when I thought It wasn’t working. So to revise my question, how can I get this to work in word as it now does in notepad?

Thanks for the help.

This discussion is closed to new replies.