Using the "Send To" Feature in Microsoft Windows

I don't know about anyone else but I am always looking to increase the performance of day to day use on my computer. There are all sorts of tips and tricks you can do to make daily tasks quicker and easier. For some people it's all about organizing things so they know where they are and for others it's the extra applications that add functionality and features at your finger tips.

There is a not so well known feature in Microsoft Windows that makes a lot of tasks easier and faster. This feature is called the Send To menu. This menu contains a bunch of shortcuts to programs and locations on your computer. By default the menu will include compressed zip file, desktop, mail recipient and my documents. What this allows you to do is easily compress a file into a zip file, send a file to the desktop, email a file using your default email client and send a file to you're my documents folder. You can see how this could save quite a bit of time. You wouldn't have to manually open all of these folders or complete these actions.

Now you might be thinking, these are nice to have but I won't really use these that often. You may be wishing that there were other things you could add to this menu. Well you are in luck because you can add just about anything you could want in this menu. I'll guide you through an example so you can customize the menu to your liking.

A good example would be opening a file with notepad. I'll show you how to create a notepad option in the Send To menu so you can choose to open anything with notepad at will. Go into my computer, into the hard drive windows is installed on, the documents and settings folder, the folder whose name is your user name and then the send to folder. You will now see the icons that are in the send to menu, right here in this folder. This is where they are stored. Now we will add the notepad icon. Right click an empty spot in the folder and choose new, then shortcut. Browse to the location of the notepad.exe, which should be in your windows directory. Once you have selected it and hit okay, you will notice that now you have a notepad icon in this folder. If you close out of this folder and go find a file you want to open in notepad, right click on it, choose the send to menu and then click on the notepad icon, you guessed it; it will open up in notepad ready to be edited.

You can add virtually any program or location to the send to menu. This is a very good way to speed things up and make using your computer more enjoyable. Thanks for reading and enjoy.