This article is about how to access your recent documents. Most of you would be familiar with the “My Recent Documents” option on the “Start” Menu but this just shows 15 recently visited files….Which is clearly not enough so in this article we have given alternate options which are more comprehensive.
My recent documents option is a very handy feature as it allows users to access their recent documents instantly without using time-consuming search files option. This is especially useful when you create some document but can’t remember where you saved it.
To enable “My recent Documents” on the start menu:
.Right-click ‘Start’ and select properties
.Choose ‘Start Menu’ tab.
.Click ‘Customize’ and then ‘Advanced’ tab.
.Under Recent documents, check the ‘List my most recently opened documents’ box and hit OK.
.If you now open ‘Start’ you will notice “My recent documents” list has appeared.
However, this recent documents list is quite short and would show only the last 15 files. If you want to view more than 15 files, you can visit the “Recent” folder on your C drive.
This folder is usually at the following location:
‘C:\Documents and Settings\ your log-on name\Recent’.
If you can’t see the folder in a windows explorer, choose Tools, Folder Options and then click the View tab and select Show Hidden Files and Folders and click OK.
Alternatively, if you type the following command in the run box and press Ok, it will directly take you to the recent folder even if it is set to the “Hidden” option:
%userprofile%\recent
But this will show all the documents like all your recently visited excel files, word files, images etc. And because these are simply the shortcuts to their original locations so the type of all the files is shortcut rather than .xls for excel, .doc for word files so, if you want to filter your recent documents so that it only shows you .xls files, you can do so using the search option.
Search for all files and folders then in the first box “All or part of the file name” enter .xls and then in the “look in” box simply copy the location of your recent documents folder. And hit search. Now it will only show you the excel files that you recently used. To save time for the future, you can save your search using the “save search” option under the file menu so that next time you just have to hit “Search” to access all your recently visited excel files.
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