Customize the Places Bar

In Windows 2000, Microsoft introduced some UI enhancements that are mostly aimed at easing users' experience with the system shell. The usefulness of these "improvements" has undergone debate. The HTML-based Active Desktop, in particular, constitutes a big change for Windows NT 4.0 users. Like it or not, the new UI gives power users a chance to personalize their desktop to make their daily activity more efficient. Let's look at how you can customize one of the new UI features: the Open dialog box's Places bar.

The Open Dialog Box
You've probably noticed that when some applications run under Win2K, their Open dialog box looks a little different from how it looks in NT 4.0. Figure 1 shows the Open dialog box, which I opened by clicking File, Open in Win2K's Notepad utility. The Win2K dialog box has a new element that you won't find in the template of the same dialog box in earlier versions of the OS: a vertical button bar at the left-hand side of the window. The Win2K software development kit (SDK) documentation refers to this bar as the Places bar.

The Places bar is designed to help users reach frequently used folders with a single mouse click. The bar contains up to five buttons, each of which points to a system folder. You can click any of these buttons once to cause the dialog box to immediately show the contents of the selected folder.

The default Places bar contains a button for each of the following folders: History, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places. The History folder is the system repository for the most recently accessed documents and folders. Thus, it's the first place you should look for recently opened files. Many users frequently use the other four folders as well.

The default configuration of the Places bar attempts to satisfy the largest audience by including the folders that users visit most often. However, this default configuration might not fit the way you work. If not, you might want to customize the Places bar.

Changing Places
You won't find the Places bar folders clearly listed in the registry or anywhere else. Therefore, unless you manually or automatically create a new set of places, Win2K uses the standard set.

The Places bar is considered a systemwide resource. So, when you designate a group of folders as places, you set the places for all the Win2K applications. This restriction means that you can't assign one group of folders for Notepad and another group for Paint. All programs running under Win2K feature the same list of places—either the standard list or the list you've customized. (Microsoft Office 2000 programs can have a different set of places, but I tell you more about that later.)

The first step in designating your own group of folders for the Places bar is to tell the system that you don't want the default list of places. Create the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ComDlg32\Placesbar registry subkey. (You probably already have the Policies subkey but not the ComDlg32 subkey.) After you create this subkey, you'll notice that the Open dialog box's Places bar is empty. The Placesbar subkey tells Win2K that you don't want the standard places, but you haven't yet listed your own choices.

The Placesbar subkey can contain up to five entries named Place0 through Place4, so you can specify, but not exceed, as many as five folders. Win2K won't recognize or handle correctly an entry with the name Place5 or Place6, or any other name. You should assign places in order—for example, don't set Place0 and Place2, skipping Place1. An untidy and sparse list of places puts an unpredictable sequence of icons and folder names in the Places bar.

When adding place entries to the Placesbar subkey, one way to refer to existing folders is to specify the fully qualified name as a string. You create a new string entry containing the file-system path and folder name. The registry type for such an entry must be REG_SZ (REG_EXPAND_SZ, if you're using environment variables in the name).

You might also want to link to system folders, whose actual paths are subject to change or might be harder to remember. (Quick, do you know the file-system path of your My Documents folder?) If you want to add an entry for My Documents or Favorites, you can use its system-independent numeric ID instead of the path and folder name. Microsoft calls this ID the CSIDL. Table 1 lists the identifiers for the most common system folders. For these places, you create an entry of type REG_DWORD for the Placesbar subkey.