In my law practice, I keep all of my client files in one “clients” directory on our server. However, there are hundreds of files in there, but typically only a couple of dozen that I’m actively working on. So, I keep an “Active Cases” folder, which contains shortcuts to the active cases. To add a case to the “Active Cases” folder is a two step process - right-click and create shortcut, then right-click and “Send To Any Folder” (a Windows PowerToy - Google it if you’re interested, it’s pretty handy). However, I wanted to streamline this even more, so that I could create the shortcut and send it to the “Active Cases” folder in one fell swoop. I finally figured out how to do it, so I figured I’d share the technique with the world.
1. Create an empty DOS batch file, which is simply a text document with a “.bat” extension. I keep my DOS files in one place, so mine was called “C:\DOS\shortcut_to_active_cases.bat”. Open this file in any text editor (Notepad will work) and type in something like this:
@echo off SHORTCUT /f:%1.lnk /a:c /t:%1 > nul MOVE %1.lnk "N:DOCUMENTMRDActive Cases” > nul
Note you should change one thing - “N:\DOCUMENT\MRD\Active Cases\” is the target “Active Cases” folder in my version of this script. Obviously you will want to change this to the full path of whatever target folder you’ll be using.
One more thing - you’ll need shortcut.exe for this to work. Download it here (it’s free). The shortcut.exe file needs to live somewhere in your DOS path, but if you’re not sure about this, just put it in the same place as your batch file.
2. Save and close the batch file. In Windows Explorer, right-click on the batch file and click “Create Shortcut”. Right-click on the shortcut and click “Rename”, then rename it to something suitable as a “Send To…” target (I used “Active Cases (create shortcut)”). Right-click on the shortcut again and click “Cut”.
3. Navigate to the “C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\SendTo” folder, where USERNAME is the username that you’re logged in as. Right-click within that folder and click “Paste” to drop the shortcut to the batch file into that folder.
Now, you can right-click on a folder from within Windows Explorer and choose Send To, and your new shortcut will be one of the options you see. You’ll see a Command Prompt box flash up quickly and then disappear, and then your shortcut will be in your target folder. Handy, right?