Taking the Places bar to new places

In Windows 2000, a new feature was added to the Open and Save As common dialogs: the Places bar. It's a vertical button bar at the left-hand side of the dialogs, giving quick access to five standard locations: History, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places.

If you have renamed My Documents, My Computer, or My Network Places, you will find that your chosen names will appear in the Places bar. Less obvious is the fact that disabling "Show My Documents on the Desktop" under Folder Options in Explorer will remove the corresponding icon from the Places bar as well; you'll have four rather than five icons:

Despite running Windows 2000 since before it was released I haven't been using the Places bar, because I couldn't quite see the point of quick access to those standard locations. I don't save files to the desktop or in My Documents, and navigating to the place I want through My Computer and My Network Places isn't any faster than using the list box at the top or writing the path directly. I can imagine people finding it useful to access recent files through History; I'm just not used to working that way.

If your experience matches mine, you might find it beneficial to modify the Places bar to suit the way you work. It's possible to customize the folders displayed in the Places bar, or remove it altogether. The first step is to create the following registry key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32

To disable the Places bar, create a REG_DWORD value named NoPlacesBar under the ComDlg32 key. Leaving this value as 0 will give you the default behaviour, while setting it to 1 will remove the Places bar from the common dialogs, freeing up about 65 kilopixels of screen real estate:

In order to specify the folders you'd like to have in your Places bar, create the key PlacesBar below the ComDlg32 key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32\Placesbar

Under this new key, add up to five values named Place0 to Place4 for each folder you want the Places bar to display. Apparently, the common dialog library does not sort these entries after reading them, so it's important to create them in order. They can be either string values (REG_SZ/REG_SZ_EXPAND) containing a path, or integers (REG_DWORD) matching a CSIDL.

CSIDLs are system-independent numeric IDs for special Windows folders that may reside in different locations depending on system or user configuration. Here's a fairly complete list of valid CSIDL values (an authoritative list can be found on MSDN):

CSIDL values

Hexadecimal value	Location
0	Desktop
1	Internet Explorer (icon on desktop)
2	Start Menu | Programs (for current user)
3	Control Panel
4	Printers (locally installed)
5	My Documents (actual directory in old versions)
6	Favorites
7	Start Menu | Startup (for current user)
8	My Recent Documents
9	Send To
A	Recycle Bin
B	Start Menu (for current user)
C	My Documents
D	My Music
E	My Videos
10	Desktop (actual directory)
11	My Computer
12	Network Neighborhood
13	My Network Places
14	Fonts
15	Templates (for current user)
16	Start Menu (common)
17	Start Menu | Programs (common)
18	Start Menu | Startup (common)
19	Desktop (common)
1A	Application data
1B	Printers (link objects only)
1C	Application data (nonroaming)
1D	Start Menu | Startup (non-localized, for current user)
1E	Start Menu | Startup (non-localized, common)
1F	Favorites (common)
20	Temporary Internet Files
21	Cookies
22	Internet history
23	Application Data (common)
24	Windows directory
25	Windows system directory
26	Program Files
27	My Pictures
28	User profile directory
2B	Common Files
2D	Templates (common)
2E	Documents (common)
2F	Administrative tools (common)
30	Administrative tools (for current user)
31	Network and Dial-up Connections
35	My Music (common)
36	My Pictures (common)
37	My Videos (common)
3B	CD Burning (files waiting to be written to CD)
3D	Computers Near Me
3E	Documents and Settings

The gaps in this list are mostly due to undocumented or obsolete features. Some of the CSIDLs are obscure and most of them aren't likely to be useful in the Places bar, but feel free to experiment with them. You'll probably find that string entries with frequently accessed folders are the most useful. Here's the result of the entries I used:

The customized Places bar will be shown in all applications that use the common dialogs, but some applications use their own Open and Save As dialog boxes and won't be affected by the change. One example is Microsoft Office, although recent versions of Office have built-in tools to change the corresponding locations.

27 December, 2004