Microsoft Office has many features that you are able to customize to users particular needs. A particular one worth mentioning is the My Places bar of the Open dialog box which can be customized to specific network drives, local drives or folders. This is very useful because it will eliminate the need for users to continually have to browse to the folder in which they want to save data. For example, if users have home folders stored on a network server, you can add this location to the My Places bar.

Follow the steps below to customize the My Places Bar.

1. Within any Office application, select the File menu and the Open option.

2. Navigate to the folder or drive that you want to add to the My Places bar. Click the folder or drive to select the item.
3. Click the Tools button on the toolbar and select Add to My Places.

The new button is now displayed at the bottom of the list of the My Places bar.

The Open dialog box default size is setup to show five default icons, however you can resize the dialog box to display the additional icons. An alternative solution to enlarging the dialog box is to change the My Places bar view to small icons to display more icons.

[tags]windows,microsoft,diana huggins,my places bar,office xp[/tags]