“Send To” and making your Desktop work for you

20. November 2007 by admin.

These subjects have probably been covered before but if not……. 

Send To….. 

Are you on a network or hooked up to other computers and want to quickly send files back and forth?

Ever noticed the Send To option when you right click on files and wonder if you could add something to that option to make it easier to send files?  Well, there is a way to do that.

If you go to My Computer and then to your C: drive, you will then see a Documents and Settings folder.  A subfolder underneath there should be a user name.  Mine is “brecord.”  Yours could be something like “Breck Record.”  Whatever it is, click on your User folder.  At that point, you may or may not see another folder beneath there that is called Send To.  If you don’t see it, do this:

Look at the top window where you see File, Edit, View, Favorites, Tools and Help. 

Click on the Tools option and then click on Folder Options. 

When the Folder Options window opens up, you should see a “View” tab.  Click on the View tab.

Within that tab, in the window, you should see “Hidden files and folders” subfolder and there should be an option to click to “show” the hidden folders.

Click on “show hidden files and folders” and then close that window.

Now, you should see a Send To folder.

Now, for simplistic purposes, let’s say you have a folder where you want to store your files after you’ve edited them.  Let’s say you’ve called that file, for instance, “Breck Backup” and it’s off of your C: drive.

Make sure that you are in the Send To folder and right click somewhere in that window.  You should see “New” down towards the bottom of that window.  Place the cursor on “New” and then another window should open up giving you an option for Shortcut second option down below Folder.

Browse to where your folder is that you want to store a file in when the Create Shortcut window opens up.  Find the folder that you want to send a file to and choose it.  Click Okay and then you should see the “path” in the window.  Click Next and you have an option to name the shortcut.

Windows will try to suggest a name for you for the name but you have the option of changing that to your liking.

Once you click to finish that window, you should now be able to go find a file(s), highlight that file(s) and then right click and click on Send To and have a new option of wher to send files to.

Now, where this really comes into play for me is across the network to where I can send my reporting files and audio sync files across the network to my scopoist’s computer, when she’s here in the office.

You need to have a working knowledge of networks to be able to set them up to work and also make sure that you have “shared” folders across the network.  I also have set up Send To folders for me to send my ASCII files to a central hard drive on the network as well as the “final” court reporting file(s) to a central hard drive on the network.  An example might look like this in the Browse window across a network:  \\brecktoshiba\breck.  This would indicate that I am accessing the network by using the two backslashes to look for the “brecktoshiba” computer and then find the shared folder called “breck” within my reporting folders on my Toshiba laptop that my scopist might be working on.  Should I want to send a file to this computer, I would highlight the files to send, right click on them and click Send To and I should see a Breck Toshiba option. 

Making your Desktop work for you……

Everyone has icons on their desktop, but do you know how to make an icon on your Desktop?  

Right click anywhere on your Desktop and you should see “New” about halfway down on the next window.  Click on New and then you should see a “shortcut” option to create a new shortcut.  Click on Shortcut and then Browse to the folder that you’d like to place on your desktop.  One of my favorite shortcuts on the Desktop is the one that takes me straight to my folder where my Eclipse files are found, and the other one is the shortcut that takes me straight to where my block files are found.  If I was to manually do that using My Computer, the path would look something like this:  c:\program files\advantage software\eclipsent\users\breck   That is just way too much trouble when I can make a shortcut on my Desktop that, by clicking on, goes straight to the folder/area I want to go to. 

These shortcuts also work across a network.  For instance, using the Breck Toshiba analogy from above, I could make a shortcut that would jump me straight to my Toshiba laptop and go straight to my Breck folder on my Toshiba.  That is definitely a timesaver because otherwise, one has to go to My Computer, Network Places, Entire Network (sometimes if you don’t see Entire Network, just hit F5 and that will bring up that option), Microsoft Windows Network, etc., etc., etc.  Don’t think I need to go on.  You get the point.

Okay.  Now that we’ve got some shortcuts set up, let’s also assume that you like to download a lot from the Internet.  You send files to a scopist, you download music, you download updates.  You’re a downloading fool.

Well, invariably, you have probably clicked on something to download and the path where you want to download is not the default path you may have set up or you’ve downloaded something somewhere and now Windows thinks that your next download should go there.  What do you do??  You probably click on Save, browse to the folder where you want to put the file(s), right?  Sometimes that path is deep in the Windows tree and you wish there was an easier way to do this.  Well, there is. 

Remember the Desktop shortcuts that I showed you how to make??  Well, when you click Save and then are given the option of where to download, if you have made a Desktop shortcut, all you have to do is click on the window that says “Save in” and if Desktop is an option, click there and then it should give you all the icons on your desktop, and, if you have made the shortcuts that you want, you should be able to click on a shortcut and then it will take you directly to that folder without the hassle of having to click through to the path.  This, again, is especially neat if you are on one computer, but want to save your file(s) on another computer on the network.  Instead of downloading the files on your computer, and then highlighting the files and clicking on Send To, you could just click straight to the folder you want to use across the network and save the extra step. 

I have found this last option very useful over the years when downloading files and saving them on my computer.  One thing I normally do is if I’ve set up a shortcut from the Desktop, I will go ahead and click and save that path and then make the shortcut in the Send To folder, or, make the shortcut in the Send To folder and then copy and save it and make the shortcut on the Desktop.  I figure if I wanted it on the Desktop, I probably will make use of it in the Send To folder.

I hope some of these tidbits are useful to some of you.  Perhaps others will read this and enhance or add to what I’ve posted here or make other suggestions or ideas.

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