Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 25, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One thing that I never understood was why Microsoft didn’t make adding New Folders easier in Windows. Sure it is always possible to right-click and go to New->Folder but there should really be an option immediately available to the user without having to go through menus. On top of that Microsoft placed a New Folder button inside the Save dialog box but they don’t even make the same button available for the toolbar in Windows Explorer. Does that make any sense? It didn’t make any sense to me and that is why I went on the hunt looking for a solution. To my surprise there were no really good solutions available but I did find some decent ones that will make the process of adding new folders easier. –Hotkey– I am covering this solution first because this is the one that I found to be the best. This software is called mdAxelerator and it allows you to create a hotkey for making a new folder. All you have to do is download the program and run it. There is no installation required and is only 16K in size! I just went ahead and dragged this program into my Program Files and after running it I checked the box to always start with Windows. All the program does when you press the designated hotkey is create a folder with the default name. You can then do what you want with that newly created folder. There is also a Beta version that you can download and play with but I don’t like it quite as much. I would rather the hotkey just create the folder immediately but the new Beta version will popup and ask you for the name of the folder you want to create. Some people might prefer this so here are a few screenshots of the Beta version: Settings Screen: New Folder Screen: The one thing I do like about the Beta program is that when it pops up and asks for the name of the folder it has a button called “Create and Enter”. This is pretty nice because it will create the folder and then open it up for you. The choice is up to you which version you like better, but there are still some other alternatives available… –Context Menu– This option has been around since about 1998 and was actually designed for Windows 98 but also works on Windows XP. Folder Jazz (the company who created it no longer exists) is a small application around 5K in size that would add the New Folder option to the Context Menu of Windows Explorer. The downside is that you can’t just right-click anywhere to create a new folder. You have to right-click on the parent folder and then the “New Folder” option will be immediately available to you. This file took me awhile to find because all the sites that were supposed to have it available for download said the file was missing. I eventually found it on a GeoCities site and instead of linking directly to the file on their site (because of bandwidth issues they would have) I am hosting it directly here. Instructions on installing are located inside the file for those people who download it (fldrjazz.zip). –Button–

This is probably one of the more common pieces of software that I found for a new folder solution but it is also one of my least favorites. It is called bxNewFolder and can be downloaded for free from the manufacturer’s site. As seen in the screenshot above it adds a button to the Windows Explorer toolbar but I don’t like the popup that they provide to create the new folder. Other than that I guess it gets the job done and it also assigns the F12 key to create a new folder. –Overview– I hope that you will find one of the solutions above to be reasonable because the first one will definitely save me some time. If anyone has a better solution that they have found for this please let us know because there are many people that could benefit from it! Maybe Microsoft will get the hint and just create a PowerToy for this.

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