We all know someone with a cluttered desktop
I was at a cafe with my colleague recently, preparing and sorting out some documents to present at a partner meeting that followed and observed that his desktop was filled with PDF, Word and PowerPoint files. I reminded him that he could access the files from the cloud by using OneDrive for Business, especially as we are all on an Office 365 E3 plan and was surprised to hear that he had the files in his OneDrive as well.
My colleague had been maintaining two versions of each of the files because he didn't want to be navigating through the folders in explorer to open a file. It was not productive to be doing that and I felt his pain. What would you do in that situation?
Now I’m sure that most of my readers will be familiar with creating shortcuts onto their desktop from Program Files in the hard drive. This windows function has been in existence for as long as time. It’s just that we get caught up in our busy schedules and rarely make any time to properly administrate our laptops. My suggestion was to simply put the parent PDF, Word and PowerPoint files in OneDrive directory and put them as shortcuts on the desktop. The reason being, my colleague would only need to maintain one copy of the file and it would sync across all his devices.
So, if you are not familiar with this function, or you have just recently jumped from Mac or Linux to Windows, here are the steps so that you can go about doing it:
- Keep one copy of the file in OneDrive directory.
- Right click on it
- Send to > Desktop (Create Shortcut)
- Delete the other copy that is on the Desktop.
- The shortcut icon will appear similar to the one shown in the photo below
By Oaker Min, Partner Enablement Specialist, rhipe
Oaker Min is a Partner Enablement Specialist at rhipe delivering partner transformation through the strategic implementation of Microsoft cloud technologies across APAC.