Send-To What is Send-To? One of the most powerful tools in Windows is the right mouse button. That one little button opens up so many new options and makes so many things so much easier, I find myself using this right mouse button almost more often than the left one. A particularly useful but not very commonly used right- click option is Send-To. Official Southpaw Disclaimer Okay, okay, I can already hear all you southpaws out there screaming, so here's the official PC911 southpaw disclaimer: This article was written from a right-hander's point-of-view, so all you lefties please substitute left for right and right for left in this article - unless of course it's right like in the opposite of wrong, then don't substitute anything. Everybody thoroughly confused? Ok, then let's move on and explore the Send- To option. Where to find Send-To To find out what you can do with Send-To, let's create a test file to play around with. Go to Start/Run, type in Notepad, and click OK. Notepad will open on your screen. Type something, e.g. "This is a test file." (or, if you feel creative and daring, type something else). Then click File/Save As and save this file as "test.txt" on your C drive in the root directory. Now open Windows Explorer, click on your C drive on the left to see its contents on the right. You should see a file called test.txt listed. Right- click on the test file to get the right-click menu and click on the Send-To option. You'll see a sub-menu popping up. At the very least you should have 4 options listed here that Windows installs as the default options. They are 3+ Floppy (A) Desktop (create shortcut) Mail Recipient My Documents You might see some more, we'll get to that in a moment. First, let's see how the default options work. How it works 3+ Floppy (A) Selecting this option will automatically copy the file that you right- clicked to your floppy drive A. Of course you should insert a floppy with sufficient disk space first, Send-To can't insert it for you, it's not that good. Desktop (create shortcut) Selecting this option will create a shortcut to this file on your desktop to make it a lot easier to access this file in the future by simply double- clicking the shortcut instead of having to dig for the file on your hard drive first. Mail Recipient Selecting this option will open up Outlook Express, pull up a new e-mail message window and automatically attach a copy of the selected file to the e-mail. All you do is enter the recipient and some text and you're ready to send the file on its way. My Documents Selecting this option will automatically copy the selected file to your My Documents folder. This is a great way to save some steps and make it easier to perform those tasks. You probably begin to see how handy this can be. Of course the question that pops up is "How do I customize this Send-To menu to make it work better for me?" You'll be surprised how easy it is. Customize the Send-To menu Some programs that you install might add their own option to the Send-To menu. But you can add more yourself. Customizing the Send-To menu is very simple. All you need to do is create a shortcut to the application you want to use and drop it into a certain folder. To demonstrate this, let's add an option for Notepad to the Send-To menu. Open up Windows Explorer and find the following folder: C:\Windows\SendTo You will notice that it contains a number of icons - the 4 described above and maybe more. To add the Notepad option, all you need to do is create a shortcut to the Notepad executable in this folder. To do that, right-click inside this SendTo folder, select New/Shortcut. Push the Browse button in the window that appears. In the resulting dialog box use the Look In drop down menu to select your C drive. Then double-click the Windows folder. Scroll through the list of files in this folder until you see a file called Notepad.exe. Highlight it and click Open which returns you to the Command Line of the first window. The command line should now look like this: C: \WINDOWS\NotePad.Exe. Click Next and give this shortcut a more pleasant name such as Notepad and click Finish. Now you'll see a new shortcut in your SendTo folder called Notepad. Select your C drive in Explorer, find the test file you created earlier, right- click on it and select Send-To. You will see now a new option called Notepad. Click it and the test file will automatically open in Notepad. Think about the steps you saved. Normally you would have to click Start/Programs/Accessories/Notepad, then click File/Open, maneuver through the hard drive until you find the file in question, highlight it and open it. Now you can just right-click the file in Explorer or My Computer, select Send-To/Notepad and voila! - there it is! Other Ideas Now that you know how easy it is to add options to the Send-To menu, think about the many possibilities you have to make common tasks easier. Here are a few ideas: Don't use Outlook Express and the existing Mail Recipient option doesn't work for you? Create a shortcut to your e-mail program to be able to easily attach files to an e-mail. Do you frequently copy files to a certain drive or folder? Create a shortcut to that drive or folder. Do you use several different applications to edit images? Create a folder in the SendTo folder called Images and put shortcuts to all your image editors in it for easy access. Do you use several different programs to play or edit sound files? Create a folder in the SendTo folder called Sounds and put shortcuts to e.g. Media Player, WinAmp and RealPlayer in it. Be creative. As you can see, you can customize this option as you please. Make it work best for you. Here is a power user tip: You can combine the usefulness of Send-To with a neat toolbar trick to be able to use Send-To without even having to open My Computer or Windows Explorer if you have the Internet Explorer 4 desktop enhancements installed. Right-click on an empty area of the task bar, select Toolbars and click Desktop. You'll get a new toolbar called Desktop. Now grab the little gray handle at the end of the desktop toolbar and make the toolbar as small as possible until you can only see the word Desktop and a little double arrow. Now you can click on the double arrow to get a pop-up menu with the contents of your computer. Simply maneuver through the contents to get to the file you want, then right-click on it, select Send-To and the option you want. It doesn't get any easier than this. Here's another power user tip: You can create a shortcut to all your printers in the Send-To menu. Open Windows Explorer, drill down to C: \Windows\SendTo, right-click in that folder, and select New/Folder. Then paste the following string into the name field for the folder: Printers.{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D} http://www.PCNineOneOne.com