Office Tips and Hints Blog

Home Page

Host your Web site with PureHost!

Saturday, April 19, 2008 – Permalink –

Explorer Default

Choose your Folder

When you click the Windows Explorer shortcut on your Start Menu, you are probably used to the fact that it always opens in the same folder. For example the My Documents folder. Vista opens to your personal User>Documents folder.

You can arrange for it to open to the folder of your choice by editing the properties of the Explorer shortcut.

Open Windows Explorer and locate your Start Menu folder (if you are using Windows XP, this will be in the c:\Documents and Settings directory under your profile). Right click the shortcut to Windows Explorer and click Properties. From the Shortcut tab, change the target so it reads as follows:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e, c:\folder

where c:\folder is the path to the folder that you want Explorer to open.

If you leave off the /e switch, Windows Explorer opens in a single pane view.

Another switch is /n. It opens a new single-pane window for the default selection. This is usually the root of the drive that Windows is installed on. If the window is already open, a duplicate opens.

Explorer.exe Command-Line Options

Click OK. Now when you launch Windows Explorer from the Start Menu, it will open in the folder that you specified.

If Explorer is not one of the shortcuts, Right click the contents pane and choose New>Shortcut.
Enter the same instructions.

You could also Right click the desktop and create a new shortcut.

[Edited entry from 11/30/2004]

See all Topics

Labels: Vista, Windows

<Doug Klippert@ 6:49 AM

Comments: Post a Comment

Links to this post:

<$BlogBacklinkTitle$>: <$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> @ <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$>

Create a Link