Word 2016 and Excel 2016 - Customize the File > Open menu

Anonymous
2015-09-28T09:13:42+00:00

Hello,

How can I customize the File > Open menu in Word 2016 and Excel 2016, please?

Add a Place works only for the cloud.

As for This PC, it shows me a list of folders I am not interested in, and that apparently I cannot remove.

On the contrary, I'd like to add different folders, which are not even in the C drive but on a D drive.

The only customization I found is in Options > Advanced > File Locations, in there I changed the location for Documents to my D drive, but it does not affect the File > Open menu at all.

And in Excel 2016, this command is not even there under Options.

Thanks and regards,

Marco

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Suzanne S Barnhill 279.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2015-09-28T13:49:12+00:00

You can bypass this entirely by checking the box for "Don't show the Backstage when opening or saving files" at File | Options | Save. You can then use Ctrl+O or an Open button on the Quick Access Toolbar to go directly to the classic Open dialog, which is an Explorer window in which you can add Favorites to the Navigation pane. When you start Word, the Open dialog will default to the folder you have specified as the default location for your documents; if you open a file from a subfolder, it will become the default for the next open operation.

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Jay Freedman 208.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2017-06-13T19:32:24+00:00

When you "add Favorites to the Navigation pane" (renamed as Quick Access in Windows 10) and pin them there, they show up in the Open and Save dialogs of Office programs. That is equivalent to pinning them on the File > Open page of the Backstage, the thing that has been (unfortunately) removed. That's one of the reasons to avoid the Backstage as Suzanne suggested.

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-10-08T12:48:06+00:00

    This worked for Word 2013 but not for Excel.  Any ideas?  It keeps showing me OneDrive as an option even though I uninstalled OneDrive.  I'd like it to either default to My Documents like Word does when unchecking "show backstop" or be able to remove OneDrive as a choice to open from.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-08-20T06:51:19+00:00

    Thanks!

    It looks like it is getting a common thing for developers to remove good working features, thus frustrating users. Probably it is less complicated (read: cheaper) to do it this way.

    Sometimes this may even push users back to using the old versions and ask for upgrade refunds.

    [Off-topic]

    A wellknown screencapture program, at the release of their version 12, changed the entire GUI to some 'bare' one.

    The ribbon was gone, the Quick Access Toolbar was gone, features (like text recognition) were removed and often more clicks were required to do the same as with the previous version.

    There were many, I mean many complaints. The company sometimes even suggested to return to previous versions, which seems to me to be a poor recommendation and not really benificial from a commercial point of view.

    With so many complaints in mind and so many users returning to the 'old' version, I would say that their release (v13) should more or less be based on the old one (v11), but somewhat polished up here and there. Add some new tweaks, but that's it. 

    Everybody happy.

    Guess what ...  

    Their new version (v13) is still based on that v12 one! No lessons learned.

    How come they can afford to do this?

    Simply, there are no other real 'competitors' around.

    How come MS can afford to do this...

    Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

    All that said, actually, without any disrespect for your comments, which, again, is much appreciated, the matter I brought up is that there is so much 'empty' space on the right side of the File Open->This PC or Recent.

    Space that can not be resized and thus long filenames are cut off.

    (BTW I know I can use the File Open->Browse mode, which is actually workaround then)

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-08-19T17:42:15+00:00

    Short anwer: No!

    That is something that MS "new & improved" out in 2016 (as well as messing with the sort order). If you click on the "Recent" button (just above "This PC" which you have clicked in your screen cap) all you now see only files. In earlier versions we used to be able to see and pin both files and folders, ie 2010:

    You can only approximate this by pinning folders in Explorer. But this pins are not application specific. You can see them in the "old" Open dialog. The green box shows folders I have "pinned" to "Quick Access" in Windows 10

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