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Adding Your own Items to the Context Menu
Now that you have removed all of the extra clutter from your context menus, why not add some useful entries to your menus? You can add a lot of cool things to your context menus that can enhance your experience with your computer. My favorite item to add to my context menus is a "Send Attached to Message" entry. This entry in my context menu grew out of a need to find a better way to email files. I send a lot of messages every day, often just for the purpose of sending a file. I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if I could just right-click on a file and select some option that would automatically open up Microsoft Outlook, create a new message, and attach the file? That would streamline the whole process by knocking out a few steps.
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Menu item appending to Windows Explorer Shell context menu may be easily done in Windows 98 and Windows 200, but because this method works only for Windows 95 / Windows 98 (not on XP, Vista, x64 - 64-bit Windows), to add items to Windows Explorer Shell context menu you should use, according to Microsoft guidelines, appropriate .Net component - Windows Explorer Shell Context Menu. Adding an entry to a context menu in Windows 98 is very simple. The most difficult part of solving my little puzzle was figuring out how to launch Outlook so it would automatically create a message and attach the desired file to it. After a few minutes on Google researching, I came across Outlook-Tips.net which is a great resource for just the information that I was looking for. According to outlooktips.net, I just had to launch Outlook with the /a switch and the name of the file. Once I had this information, I had all of the pieces of the puzzle and was ready to start putting it together. Perform the following steps to learn how to add your own item to any File Types context menu:
1. First, open up My Computer.
2. Click on the Tools menu bar item and select Folder Options.
3. Click on the File Types tab to expose all of the different file types on your computer.
4. Because I usually send Word documents, I scrolled down the list of file types and selected the .doc file extension. Pick any other file extension for which you would like to add an entry.
5. Once you have the entry selected, click the Advanced button to bring up the Edit File type window.
6. Click the New button to add an entry.
7. In the Action box, type in the name that you want to appear on the menu. I typed in Send Attached to Message.
8. In the Application Used to Perform Action box, you will want to specify the application and any switches that you will want to use for this new entry. Click on the Browse button to easily browse to an executable file. I navigated until I found OUTLOOK.EXE inside the OFFICE11 folder.
9. When you click OK, the path to the executable file will fill the box. Now you will want to add any application flags at the end of the line. To tell Outlook to create a new message and attach a file to it, I had to add /a after the path followed by %L. The %L is a system variable that holds the name of the file that you are right-clicking on. When I was finished, my box looked like the following (including the quotes): "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE" /a "%L".
10. When you are finished editing your new entry, click OK to save it.
You are now finished adding an entry to a specific File Types context menu. If you followed all of the previous steps to add the "Send Attached to message" entry, every time you right-click on a Word document, you will now see the new entry, as shown in Figure 5-4. If you want to add the same entry on other file types, just repeat the previous directions by selecting a different file type in step 4.
You can do even more things with the context menus. If I wanted to, I could use the different switches that I found on the Outlook Tips Web site to make my entry send the file to a specific person instead of leaving the To field blank in Outlook. Once you know the %L variable, you can send the name of the file to any program, given that you know the correct switches with which to launch the program.
Modifying the Send To Menu
The Send To menu is one of features of my context menus that I use the most. The ability to right-click on any file and have a shortcut for it sent to the desktop is invaluable. All of the other features are very useful as well. How would you like to make it even more useful? It is very easy to add your own items to the Send To menu, such as folders that you can send files to. Do you have a folder that you store all of your music in? How about a folder that you store all of your digital photos in? Just follow the quick steps below to add anything that you want to your Send To context menu entry.
1. Open up My Computer and browse to the C drive, or whatever drive you have Windows installed to.
2. Browse through the Documents and Settings, your user name, and the Send To folders.
Tip: If you do not see any of the folders that are required in this section, you may have hidden files turned on. Because these folders are hidden by default, you will have to tell Windows to show all files. To this, refer to the section on working with hidden files towards the end of this chapter.
3. When you are looking at C:\Documents and Settings\Username\SendTo, you will see all of the files that appear in the Send To menu. If you want to add an entry to the menu, just copy a shortcut to this folder.
4. Let's say that you want to add your Digital Photos folder to your Send To menu. Just navigate to your Digital Photos folder and right-click on it and select Send To desktop. Then just cut and paste the shortcut that was created from your desktop into the SendTo folder.
5. If you ever want to remove some items from the Send To menu, just delete them from the Send To folder.
It's that simple. You are now finished customizing your Send To menu. Now you will be able to fine-tune all of the different features of your context menus so that you can get the most out of your Windows XP experience.
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