In Office 2007, when you go to save a file, there was a default list of locations on the left side of the pop-up window. That used to be called the “My Places” bar, it is now labeled “Favorite Links”.

If you create many documents and you need to save them in a location that is not listed (Such as a network drive, a mapped drive, a USB drive…), it gets to be tiresome to constantly click through to get where you want to save.

You can add a location in Windows Vista or 7 easily. The list of shortcuts under the Favorite Links is located under the username/Links folder. The username is your logon name.

You can add or remove locations by adding to or deleting from this list.

To delete an unwanted location simply right-click on the shortcut in the right hand pane and select “Delete” from the drop down list.

To add a location, you need to first navigate to the location you want to add. To do that I suggest, you leave the window above open (I am presuming you navigated to yours and opened it, not assuming). for the sake of ease, just press the “Windows” key on your keyboard (the one with the Windows logo located between the “Ctrl” and “Alt” keys located in the lower left of your keyboard) and press the “E” key at the same time. Now navigate to the location or folder you want to add to your “Favorite Links”.

As you can see I navigated across my network to my Windows Home Server (WHS), to the “Public” and into the “WeeklyGeek” folder. Now I can right-click just to the right, on the top bar, of the arrow after “WeeklyGeek” and select the “Copy Address” choice.

Now close the window to the location you just navigated to, go to the “Links” window you opened earlier, right-click in a blank area on the right side and select “Paste” from the choices. The new location will appear. In my case it created the folder “WeeklyGeek” which is located at the top of my list.

That is all there is to it. Now when you are creating a document and want to save it in your designated location, simply go to “Save As” and the shortcut is in your list. By the way, if you are concerned about locations with the same name, you can right-click on the location (WeeklyGeek) select “Rename” from the choices and name it appropriately. In my example I wanted to be sure I remembered it was on the WHS, so I renamed it “WeeklyGeek on WHS”.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!