T 'n' T: What's New? Make the Right Click with Windows' "New" Menu Gregg Keizer
Mon 8/12/02 -- Right-click on the Windows desktop, and a pop-up menu offers a bunch of choices. Among them is New, a submenu showing a list of file types or blank documents you can create on the fly. (The same choices appear when you pick File/New in Windows Explorer.) Some applications add themselves to the New menu when installed; others are put there by Windows by default. But in no instance do you have a voice in the matter. Bad move, Microsoft.
If the list of possible picks is longer than an NBA star's rap sheet -- or not long enough for your liking -- you'll love this week's tips 'n' tricks. I've figured out how to modify the New menu so it works like you want it to work; dug up some downloads that can help you make those changes; and even spilled my personal secret for skipping the New menu entirely. Enjoy.
Trim the New menu. When I pick New from the pop-up menu, Windows shows a whole slew of file types. Trouble is, most of them are totally useless to me. How many times am I going to want to create a new Wave Sound or Briefcase? Zero, that's how many times.
To trim the New list to just those file types you really need, pick Run from the Start menu, type REGEDIT, and press Enter. Pick Edit/Find, type ShellNew, and press Enter. Every ShellNew found appears under a particular file type, like .doc (Word document), .bmp (Paint bitmap image), and so on. Delete the ShellNew branch for any file type you don't want to see in the New menu by right-clicking ShellNew and selecting Delete. Close the Registry Editor.
Add to New. Want to add a new document type to, instead of subtracting from, the New menu? Here's how.
Using the program that creates the file type you want to add to New, create a blank document. Save it.
Copy the file to the C:\Windows\ShellNew or C:\WINNT\ShellNew folder. (This is a hidden folder, so you may need to first make it visible by selecting Settings/Control Panel/Folder Options from the Start menu, clicking on the View tab, and under "Hidden files and folders," selecting the "Show hidden files and folders" option.)
Start the Registry Editor by choosing Run from the Start menu, typing REGEDIT, and pressing Enter.
Open HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and locate the file extension for the file type. Right-click the file extension and choose New/Key. Name it ShellNew.
Right-click ShellNew and select New/String Value. Name it FileName.
Double-click the FileName string and change it to the filename of the document you created at the beginning of this process.
Exit the Registry Editor. You may have to restart Windows for the change to take effect.
Change what's created. Want to change what's created when you choose something from the New menu? Easy as pie.
Open the Windows/ShellNew folder and launch one of the documents you find there. Say you want New to create a Word document that always includes boilerplate text at the beginning of the document. In that case, open the Word document you find in the ShellNew folder. Make changes to this document -- add the boilerplate text at the top of the Word file, for instance -- and save it. The next time you choose this file type from the New menu, the modified document is created.
Stay away from the Registry. If you're nervous about monkeying with the Registry, you can use tricks such as renaming a ShellNew key to something meaningless like WasShellNew so you can find and undo your changes later. Easier yet, you can download and use a menu manager. There are several suitable utilities which let you add and delete items from the New menu without resorting to manual Registry editing.
TweakUI 1.33 (for Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000) and TweakUI 2.0 (for Windows XP), two free goodies from Microsoft, make it a snap to pare the file types that appear in the New menu, and let you add new items as well.
An alternative to New. Although the New menu comes in handy, some of us don't want to go through the bother of right-clicking the desktop. For others, New is limited, since it lets you assign only one document to any application file type. That hamstrings those of us who want to pick and choose which document to quickly create.
Rather than use New, therefore, build files that you place on the desktop, then double-click to create a new document.
The majority of my work in Word, for instance, starts with one of three different document types: columns for WinPlanet.com, reviews for another publisher, and new chapters for the fiction I write. So I've created three different documents, each with suitable boilerplate such as title placeholders and subheads, saved them, then dragged the files to the desktop, where I gave them easy-to-understand names like WinPlanet Column and New Chapter.
Double-clicking one of these desktop icons -- or single-clicking its shortcut, if you activate and drag the icon to the Quick Launch toolbar near the system tray -- opens Word with that document template in place. The first thing I do then is choose File/Save As and rename the file in progress, so I don't inadvertently overwrite the template document itself.
