Melloware Placesbar Editor: add favorite folders to Windows and Office open/save dialogs

Melloware Placesbar Editor is an open source program that allows you to change the default folder shortcuts that are found in the Windows open/save dialog known as the PlacesBar. Moreover, it can also customize the MS Office open/save dialog by enabling the addition of 5 new user-defined folders for a total of up to 10 locations.

You might have noticed that there is a bar to the left of the dialog with 5 pre-defined folders on the default Windows open/save dialog. These folders allow you to quickly access folders when opening or saving files. By default these point to the following locations: My Recent Documents, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places.With Melloware Placesbar Editor you can actually customize these to any folders that you like or frequently use. Note: you can also do this using Microsoft’s excellent TweakUI and a program I previously reviewed on Freewaregenius also named Placesbar Editor.

MS Office Placesbar customization: because MS Office does not use the standard windows open/save dialog, it’s placesbar has to be approached separately. Melloware Placesbar Editor will in fact allow you to add 5 extra locations to the Office open/save dialog (something which the other programs mentioned above do not), and these do not have to be the same ones you used in the Windows open/save dialog. Here are more notes on this program:

• Installation: although it comes as a normal installer, it is in fact a single 900K executable.
• Reverting back to defaults: there’s a button on the interface that is supposed to do this, but in fact what it does is delete the user defined folders. You will then need to select the original folders using dropdowns.
• Remote folders: I was able to define folders on the network, which was cool (obviously I had to do it while connected to the network).

Wish list:

• Bugfix: at times (not always) I wasn’t able to add or change folders for the MS Office Placesbar until I reverted back to default and re-did the customization process.
• The ability to customize or delete the default MS Office folders would have been great.

The verdict: a very nice program that you can use once (or at least not very frequently) and forget about. But the reason I am posting it on Freewaregenius is the MS Office support (since, let’s face it, many people who have Office installed likely do most of their computing using that software, especially in work settings).

Version Tested: 1.0.9.59

Compatibility: Windows 2000/XP/ME/Vista. Microsoft Office 2000/XP/2003/2007.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 0.98 megs).