Do you know what’s the ‘Placebar’ ? Many people don’t know what is it although they may be using it day-in and day-out. The Windows Placebar is this:

Yup, Placebar is that long and narrow bars on the left-side of most file open/save dialog with a few shortcuts to the common folders like ‘Desktop’, ‘My Documents’, ‘My Computer’, etc.

The question here is, do you find it useful ? For me, besides the ‘My Documents’, I can say I have never open/save my files to the Desktop, My Computer, etc. So wouldn’t you want to change it ?

It’s a mystery why Microsoft have never provided a tools to change the Placebar. Luckily, there are some tools online that can help you to just that – one of it being Melloware Placebar Editor.

The program is pretty straight forward. For each of the 5 Placebar shortcuts presented, just tick the ’Custom’ tick-box and browse for your desired folder. In my settings, I change 4 of them to the folders I use often.

Click Save to save the changes, and click the Test button to see how it would look like. In my case, this is what it looks like after the changes, Neato!

You may have noticed that there’s a ‘Office’ tab in the Placebar Editor. Yes, Microsoft Office actually uses another set of Placebar (the reason for this, again, is beyond me). You can add 5 more shortcuts beside the standard ones, as shown below.

I’ve just added 3 shortcuts to the folder I usually use (2 for my recent projects, and 1 for my office general documents). Now my Office File dialog looks like this (notice the changes to the Placebar on the left):

Here’s another tips for you: you can actually change the Microsoft Office’s Placebar manually without this Placebar Editor. From the Microsoft Office file dialog, browse to the folder that you wish to add to the Placebar, then right-click on the Placebar. A menu item called ‘Add xxxxxx’ will be shown, where ‘xxxxxx’ is the name of the current folder you just browsed to (check below). Just click on that menu item to add it to the Placebar, easy!