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How Do I ..... Add the Vet system to Word/Excel

It can get a little troublesome always having to naigate folders to get to the vetsystem for loading/saving files. Here's what to do:

When searching for files in Microsoft Word you might have noticed the shortcuts in the Places bar on the left-hand side. The default options include History, My Documents, Desktop, Favourites and My Network Places, but what if you want to create your own shortcuts?

Searching through the Word menus won't help as there are no options to add any icons or further links, to customise your Office options you have to delve into the murky world of your hard drive, and more specifically the functions of the Registry Editor.

  1. Find the Registry

    Before we start making changes in your hard drive always make a back up, because if anything gets deleted or goes wrong you can always reboot and begin again. In the first part of this tutorial we shall open up the Registry and change the icon sizes to make some room on the Place bar for the new shortcuts we will create. Start by selecting 'Run' from the 'Start' menu, then type in 'regedit' and click 'OK'. The Registry Editor will open, and we need to scroll through the Folder List to find the files we need to edit.

    • Open 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER'
    • Click on 'Software' folder
    • Click on the 'Microsoft' folder
    • Click on 'Office' then version '9.0'
        (For Word 2003 it's version 11.00, for Word 2000 it's version 10.00)
    • Click on 'Common'
    • Click on 'Open Find'
    • Click on 'Places' to highlight it
    • Select 'New' from the 'Edit' menu
    • Select 'DWORD Value'
    • Type in 'Itemsize'
    • Press 'Enter'
    • Right-click on it and select 'Modify'
    • Make sure the 'Value data' is '0'
    • Click 'OK'

    Now open up Microsoft Word and select 'Open' from the 'File' menu to check the 'Places' bar. You should see that the shortcut icons have been reduced in size, which provides a lot of space your new shortcut icons.

  2. Adding a new link

    Now that we've made our 'Places' bar icons smaller, we need to add some more places to take a shortcut to.

    Close the Word window and go back into the Registry Editor. Underneath the 'Places' folder is the 'UserDefinedPlaces' file. We need to create both new links and titles for the new links, so click on this file to highlight it, and we can begin.

    • Select 'New' from the 'Edit' menu
    • Click on 'Key'
    • A new folder will appear in the Folder list, name it 'Place1'
    • Press 'Return'
    • Click on the 'Place1' folder to highlight it
    • Select 'New' from the 'Edit' menu
    • Select 'String Value'
    • In the right-hand pane a file will appear called 'New Value#1'
    • Click on it and change it to 'Name'
    • Right-click on the same file and select 'Modify'
    • Call the link 'Vet System' and click 'OK'

    We've given the link a title and it should appear in the 'Places' bar, but we haven't actually link the shortcut to anything, so this is what we will do now.

    • Click back on the 'Place1' file in the Folder list
    • Select 'New' from the Edit menu
    • Select 'String Value'
    • Type in 'Path' instead of 'New Value#1'
    • Right-click on 'Path' and select 'Modify'
    • Type in '\\your-server\premvet\text\' to link through to the 'Text area of Premvet'
    • Click 'OK' and check if it has appeared in the Word 'Place' bar
    • Click on the link to see if it works

  3. Finishing off

    We've added an additional link in the 'Places' bar for Word, this also applies to all other programs in 'Microsoft Office'. You can repeat the above to add any other shortcuts you may want.