| originally published at TechRepublic
Teach your users how to edit their Start menus
Jeff Davis
Jul 26, 1999
The Start menu; it's a blessing or a curse for your users, depending on whether they know how to edit it. Here's a quick lesson
that can give your users a sense of control over their systems and may help them work faster to boot.
Getting rid of unused Start menu items
Figure A shows what the Start menu on my office computer looks like. The truth is, I never use the top five shortcuts on that
menu's Windows Update, Compaq Information Center, New Office Document, Open Office Document, and Desktop.ini.
And I only occasionally use Winzip, so I'm going to remove all six of those shortcuts.
Figure A: I'm going to remove the top six items from the Start menu.
Remind your users that removing these items from the Start menu doesn't remove them from the system, it just forces users to
take other steps to launch those applications.
To begin, just right-click on the Taskbar and choose Properties. When the Taskbar Properties dialog appears, click the Start
Menu Programs tab, and then click the Remove button. When you do, you'll see not only the files available in the Start menu,
but all of the applications available under Programs too. If the Programs section is expanded, click the minus sign beside the
word Programs to collapse that part of the tree. (Of course, if you need to trim some fat from the options under the Programs
menu, you could do that now too.)
At this point, you should be able to see the items you want to delete, as shown in Figure B. Select the first item you want to
remove, press the [Delete] key, and that's all there is to it. Figure C shows what my Start menu looked like after I deleted those
six items.
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Figure B: Collapse the Programs tree to make it easy to spot the additional items you may want to delete.
Figure C: Here's what my Start menu looks like after I deleted the items I almost never use.
Adding items to the Start menu
Once your users have deleted the unused items from the Start menu, the next logical step is to add programs they use all the
time. As you'd expect, start the same way; by right-clicking on the Taskbar, choosing Properties, and clicking the Start Menu
Programs tab. This time, click the Add button. When you do, you'll see an entry field labeled Command Line. This isn't the
most user-friendly interface to ever come out of Redmond; since the paths to most executable files are sometimes five miles
long. However, just click the Browse button, and you can navigate to the appropriate directory and double-click on the
appropriate program file.
By the way, don't touch the filename that the system enters for you. It'll look funny because it will end with the extension .LNK.
Figure D shows what my Browse dialog looked like when I double-clicked the .exe file for Lotus 1-2-3 97.
Figure D: When you select a program file, let Windows fill in the filename.
Pay attention to the next step
After you've selected a program file, click Open. When you do, the Select Program Folder dialog will appear and Programs
probably will be selected by default. If you don't want this program to appear under Programs, select Start Menu, as shown in
Figure E. Click Next and you'll get to select a name for the shortcut; which is typically the name associated with the program
file. Click Finish to put the new addition on top of the original Start menu. Figure F shows my new Start menu.
Figure E: If you want the new item to appear on top of Programs, select the Start Menu option as shown here.
Figure F: Here's my new Start menu.
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