Did you know you can drag any folder to the Taskbar and it’ll become a toolbar? Any files you have inside can be accessed from the toolbar, just like the print, open, forward and back buttons at the top of this screen.
Let’s say you have a folder with documents you need regularly through your day, like Excel spreadsheets you need to constantly update. If they’re all in the same folder, just drag it to the Taskbar, and the folder’s name will appear. If the Taskbar isn’t too cluttered, you can see the individual files in the folder. Otherwise a » will be next to the folder’s name, and clicking it will show you all the files inside.
I did this at home for my Winamp playlists. I could access any album for which I had a playlist much faster than scrolling through my library. At work (shown left) I have Excel sheets, Word documents, a PDF of the NYC subway, and other folders I access a lot.
If you use files that aren’t in the same spot, like website bookmarks, word documents, photoshop files, etc. you can create a folder to hold shortcuts to them. Make a new folder somewhere, mine is on the desktop, and place shortcuts to important files in there. This way, you’re not moving the files themselves, just creating links to them, and keeping all the links in one place. Think of it as bookmarks for files on your computer, instead of pages on the web. Then drag the Shortcuts folder to the taskbar, and voila! you have one click access to the things you use everyday, no matter what else is cluttering up the screen.
Creating shortcuts to files is easy too. You can hold down ALT while dragging the file, and when you release the mouse button, it’ll place a shortcut there. Or after you copy a file, you can right-click and select ‘paste shortcut.’
Happy time saving!
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