Pin a favorite location

Windows Vista has a slew of little features that make file management much easier than ever before. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a link for quick access to your important files. If you routinely need to access content on a deeply buried network folder, for instance, then you could easily spend the bulk of your time just navigating to the right location.

To simplify your file management tasks, why not just make create a link to that folder? Using Windows Vista, it’s a lot easier than ever before. Amid your personal folders (and there are a lot of them), there’s a folder called Links. No, it’s not the same as Favorites, but the two folders do share a lot of similarities.

Favorites is more commonly associated with Internet shortcuts (a.k.a. bookmarks). While it’s technically true that any shortcut can be added as a favorite, they are primarily visible within Internet Explorer instead of Windows Explorer, so it can be rather awkward to incorporate these favorites into your file management routine.

Links is a special folder designed to hold, well, links to commonly used file locations. Any shortcuts that you place into this folder become instantly accessible to all of your Windows Explorer windows via the Favorite Links pane, including the standard Open and Save As windows in most of your favorite programs.

To create a link, simply navigate to your Links folder create a shortcut to the desired location in your Links folder.

Here’s a tip that makes creating links even easier: simply open Windows Explorer, navigate to the parent folder, and drag the target folder across the separator and into the Favorite Links folder.

Voila! Windows automatically creates the necessary shortcut in the Links folder, and the link appears in the Favorite Links pane in every Explorer window, giving you quick and easy access to the folder anywhere you need it. You can easily right-click and rename the link, just like any other shortcut. Items can also be reordered within the pane via drag-and-drop or automatic sorting (right-click on a link to see the options).

When you no longer need a favorite link, you can simply delete the shortcut. Finally, you can right-click the Favorite Links pane to open the Links folder or restore the original set of shortcuts, just in case you go a little crazy.

– Greg