In an earlier post, I showed you how to use Favorites in File Explorer to quickly find files. (‘Favorites’ are now called ‘Quick access’ in Windows 10, but they work pretty much the same way.)
Another feature of File Explorer—that you may never have noticed—is ‘Open file location’.
The great thing about this feature is there isn’t anything to set up. It’s just a menu option that’s always available in File Explorer. And there are even some situations where it’s available from the desktop. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Open File Location from File Explorer
Say you have a batch of project files in a folder. The one you want isn’t in your list of recently opened files, but another one from the same folder has been opened recently.
So instead of having to navigate through multiple layers of folders, here’s what you can do.
- Click on ‘Quick access’ and then right-click on the recently accessed file. (In this case, we’re going to select the draft document for this post: ‘Windows 10 – Open File Location’.)
- Left-click the menu option ‘Open file location’.
- File Explorer opens the folder your file is in (called ’20 Open File Location’ in our example). From here you can select another file to open in the current folder (like ofl1.png in this example), or navigate up a level to easily get to another file within the same parent folder. And, you can see the complete path to get here, if you need to know that.
Open File Location from the Desktop
If you’re like me, you have some apps on your desktop that are special-use things you’ve downloaded off the web. Sometimes you’ll want to go look at the documentation, but it’s not terribly convenient to go find it… And you just found another good use for ‘Open file location’.
- Hovering over the app icon on your desktop does show you the location of the app executable file, but it’s annoying to go digging through File Explorer to get there.
- So instead, right-click on the icon to get a drop-down menu. Click on ‘Open file location’ to go straight to the folder housing the app’s files.
- From within the app’s folder, you can quickly get to the documentation, the uninstall routine, or most other files related to this app.
Before you forget, go try this out. In no time, you’ll wonder how you ever did without this great shortcut!
There are more trading computer tips like this in our buyers guide. Check out our “How To Buy a Trading Computer” e-book.
We hope today’s Quick Tip helped you. If you found this helpful, you’ll want to check out the other computer How-To’s I’ve created on this page. You can always call us if you have questions: 800-387-5250