Yesterday, I explained how to change the five icons that appear in the Places Bar in Windows common dialog boxes. If you use Microsoft Office, you can do a few extra tricks.
First things first: Although the Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on) look similar to those in other Windows programs, they actually come from a completely different DLL file. So when you customize the Windows common dialog boxes, the Office versions remain unchanged.
To tweak the Office versions, open any Office program (Word, for instance) and choose File, Open. Here are three ways you can change these dialog boxes:
- To change the size of the icons from large to small, right-click anywhere in the Places Bar and choose Large Icons or Small Icons from the shortcut menu.
- To add a new folder to the Places Bar, select its icon in the main window, then click the Tools menu at the top right corner of the dialog box and choose Add to “My Places.” To remove an icon you added, right-click the icon in the Places Bar and click Remove. (You can’t remove the standard icons – My Documents, My Recent Documents, etc.)
- To change the order of icons shown in the Places Bar, right-click the icon you want to move and then click Move Up or Move Down on the shortcut menu. You might need to do this several times to get an icon into its proper position.
In Office dialog boxes, you can have as many icons as you want (unlike the Windows versions, which limit you to five icons, in large size only).
Ed Bott 