You may have dozens of Excel workbooks that you use, but chances are that there are a select few that you work with frequently and intensely. There are a couple ways within Excel to make those commonly used workbooks faster to access so that you can get your work accomplished with less clicking around.
When starting Excel and selecting 'Open', most people just navigate through the directory structure to the location of all their saved workbooks and browse for the one they want. However, it may be quicker to find it in the list of most recently accessed workbooks.
To tailor this list, you can adjust the number of recent workbooks that show up in it. To change that, go to the File menu and select 'Options'. Select the Advanced group from the list on the left. Then, in the Display section, you can change the number of Recent Workbooks and Recent Folders that you would like to have appear.
To see the list of Recent Folders, select 'Open' and 'Computer'. On the right, you'll see Current Folder at the top, and under that is the list of the most recent folders.
Pinning Workbooks and Folders
For those workbooks and folders that you access regularly and don’t want to get lost in the list of Recent Workbooks or Recent Folders, you can pin them for easy future access. When you hover over the file name, you will see a gray thumbtack to the right. Just click on it, and it will pin it to the list of Recent Workbooks.
You can do the exact same thing with folders.
To un-pin any workbook or folder, just click the pin again and it will remove it from the list of Recent Items. Now you can spend less time getting your items open and more time using them!
Leave us a comment and let readers know what Excel tips you use on a daily basis.