I move a lot of data for customers in any given week.  We move blogs from all manner of current platforms including lately a lot of HubSpot and Blogger sites, but also custom platforms and cms (content management systems).  Sometimes it is a static site that is moving to WordPress.  Sometimes it is comments from Disqus to WordPress– you just never know.  But what you do know is that I need to save a lot of files to a folder, work on the data and by next week I’m off to other things and don’t need to save to those locations any longer. Dialog.

Until recently when I click “save as” I get a standard dialog box offering me the default windows folders — none of which is where I am headed because I always organize sub-folders like blogwranglers > blog moves > client x > HubSpot images or something like that.  I had to go “my documents” > then through the other sub-folders.  How to avoid that?

I had my old machine set with some custom commonly used folders so I started at blog moves and only had to click on the client’s folder.  I also name currently used files with a one at the front so in the time I am working on it daily I call it 1client x which brings it to the top of the pile.  When I am finished working with it I name it zclient x which takes it to the bottom (I know I could drag them to an archive sub-folder).  I didn’t actually remember how to do this — so today I went looking and I found a good set of instructions on how to make this happen again — but I added an embellishment.

First I followed this set of directions that helped me to create a custom set of folder in my save as dialog box (I know they have a lot of advertisements on that page — enough that I might typically discount the page completely).

Note in my picture that they missed one step which is the expansion of “windows components”.  So I clicked one more time than they suggested.

My embellishment was to create a folder on my desktop (where it is easy to find/get to) called “shortcuts” and into that I then right clicked and dragged this weeks folders, being very careful to choose shortcut from the options — now I added this “shortcuts” folder to the save as dialog box and I am always one click away from saving to this week’s project folders.

I hope this is helpful to you.  It made my week all the more pleasant and saved me a number of mouse clicks — they only click so many times before they wear out you know …