Hi Andrew,

Over time MS Office has 'surrendered' some its
feature set, where it's common to Windows to
the folks who manage the Windows product.

You can use the Places bar and the Tools=>Add to my places
feature to have links to up to 10 folders in the left hand
navbar and there are utilities that let you add 255 folders
to the Places bar on the left of the screen and in
the app as well
 http://msnavigator.com  and http://mswizards.com

You may be able to modify either the right click (context)
menu in File=>open as well, but you may want to use the
'feedback' link on the 2nd link above on that.
The author of the utilities above has been working on/with
customizing Word since it first came out :)

=========
Hi!

I have recently migrated my organization desktops to office 2003, and
users started asking different questions.

One series of them i could answer and handle by using built-in help and
google, but some remain a mystery.

Many of the users have set up their favorites folder so that it contains
links to folders and files that reside on server. They used a feature
built into office 97-XP: you get an open dialog, click on the folder,
click to `tools` and select `add to favorites`. This functionality is gone
in 2003, and some users (especially my boss) are very disappointed by
that. Is there any way to get back that particular option. The problem
with adding a web toolbar and selecting `add to favorites` from there is
that
a) it does not allow to add folder shortcuts to favorite folder
b) it creates URL links to the document, that cause problems if attempt to
open with office application is made i.e.
link is say...to \\server1\hiddenshare2$\textdocument3.xls If a link to
this file is added using web toolbar then when you point excel to favorite
folder and double click the item, you get a wrong file name error, because
excel treats file location incorrectly (my guess).

The question remains: is there ANY way to get back the original `add to
favorites` item in the tools menu of the open dialog box.

Thanks,

Andrew >>