Using shortcuts (Office 2000)

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Hi everyone,

I save everyone’s documents on my computer and once a month I copy everything to a CD which is passed on and copied to the other computers. When we want a file to appear in more than one folder I create a shortcut. Since the path is different on each computer the shortcuts I create on mine don

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If you create a new folder with the same name and on the same drive on each PC, then you should be able to copy the shortcuts as well as the files, though the shortcuts would presumably be on the desktop rather than in the same folder. You don’t say how many PCs are involved, but you might want to consider creating a network – it would save you lots of steps and solve problems like this one very nicely.

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Despite creating a file server on the network is the best solution anyway, you can continue to use shortcuts on your CDs. To do so, you must be sure that all CD drives on all computers that use this CD have the same drive letter assigned (D: or E: or F: or whatever). If drive letter is not the same (D: on one, E: on another etc), change it. Then, before burning the CD, collect all your folders in the same place (For example, C:MONTH) and use this folder as root when burning the CD. To create shortcuts, replace this location in the path with CD drive letter (for example, C:MONTHFolder1Subfolder2document.doc to F:Folder1Subfolder2document.doc). It is not too complicated, just requires attention.

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Thanks for the ideas; We are three people in the company and are usually all in different locations, which is why we use a CD as a means of updating everyone’s computer files once a month.
I will try the idea of creating a new folder directly on C:/ and move my company folder and subfolders there . I guess I could just move my company folder there rather than create another one.
When I make the CD I use drive E:/, whereas the two people who copy the files onto their computers use drive D:/ so I will also look into changing this, though I’m not sure I understand why this matters if they are copying the files back onto their C:/ drive.
One of my co-workers came up with the idea of simply having all of us logging on to our computers as administrator rather than with our names; would this work as an alternative solution?

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Changing CD-ROM drive letter makes sense only in the case when you are openinig your documents from the CD. If you are copying these files to the C: drive and opening them from here, you must create a folder with the same name in all computers and create shortcuts for such location as usual. I didn’t think about this possibility because when a new CD arrives to be copied to the hard drive, old files with the same name would be overwritten. I believe you are aware of this problem.

Now, I understand the nature of your problem: location of “My Document” folder is:
C:Documents and SettingsMy Documents
Since is different for each account, your shortcuts are pointing to the wrong place after copying.

BTW, logging on to built-in Administrator account for regular work is not recommended for security reasons. You can use
C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorMy Documents
folder for shared documents anyway; just remember that when you log on to your regular user account, the “My Documents” icon on your desktop is pointing to your own “My Documents” folder.

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Hi again everyone,
Thanks for the advice I’ve received so far. Before vacation my two bosses and I added a new account to our computers and moved all of our shared documents into this account. So we have three computers with the same path: Documents and Settings/username(the same one on all computers)/my documents. We did a trial run with a couple of shortcuts and they worked so I spent hours creating new shortcuts, copying them onto the cd so that they could copy the files onto their computers. I was so proud of myself! Well guess what? Apparently they didn’t work. In the properties dialog box for the shortcut, the target it missing after being copied. The shortcuts work fine on my computer. Does anyone have any more ideas to pass along before I pitch my computer out the window?

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This one is going to take more work… you can “map” a drive letter to a local folder using the age-old subst command. If you open a command window (Start>Programs>MS-DOS or Start>Run>cmd, depending on your system), you can check it out:

C:>subst /?
Associates a path with a drive letter.

SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1: /D
 
  drive1:        Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
  [drive2:]path  Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
                 a virtual drive.
  /D             Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.
 
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

If you open the “fake” drive, say, W, and create shortcuts relative to W, it should be possible, assuming the recipient of the CD does the same subst, to share those shortcuts. You could supply a batch file to run the subst for the receiver. But I recommend a small test before making a major commitment.

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