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How do I Organise my Favourites?
Iain Laskey shows you how to keep your favourites under control
Anyone who has visited a few web sites will no doubt have added some to their favourites. However, this list can soon become unwieldy so what are the options for organising these in to something more manageable?
Internet Explorer
There are several ways you can add a web site's URL to your list of favourites. Firstly you can click on 'Add to Favorites' under the Favorites menu. (Message to Microsoft, us Brits spell it Favourites). You can also right-click on a web page and select 'Add to Favorites'. Some web sites may even have a button to add their URL to your list. Finally, for you power users out there, you can use CTRL-D to add the current page.
So far so good. However, you'll soon end up with a very long list you need to scroll up and down when looking for a site you've saved. To tidy things up, you can create folders to group various links under. You may want to have one for game sites, one for music, one for photography and so on. You can also have folders inside folders to further help group similar sites together. Let's see how it's done.
The most common way is to select 'Organize Favorites' from the Favorites menu. Here you can create or amend folders and drag your favourites in to them (or out, for that matter) to your hearts content. The default size of this window is quite small but you can resize it to make it easier if you have many folders or shortcuts to work with. Those of a speedy disposition can use CTRL-B to open the 'Organize Favourites' window.
A less well known trick is that if you press and hold the shift key when clicking on ' Organize Favourites', you instead get a standard Windows Explorer window where you have much more room to see everything and move them around.
Once you have a nice selection of folders to tidy your favourite URLs in to, you can make use of some other options when adding new URLs. When adding a new one, either via the Favorites menu or right clicking on the page, the window that pops up has a button marked 'Create In'. Here you can specify the folder you want or create a new one if required.
You may find that the folders don't appear in the order you would like. This is easily fixed though. Simply click on the Favorites menu and then click and hold down the mouse button whilst pointing to a folder you want to move. You can then slide it up and down the list with the mouse. Release the button when the folder is where you want it. You can do the same with individual entries if required.
Finally, another right-click option on the web page itself is 'Create Shortcut'. This adds a new icon to your desktop which when clicked will fire up Explorer and open the appropriate page automatically. A great boon for regularly used sites such as online banking or today's news. Don't get too carried away with this option on older versions of Windows though. I was once called out to fix a non booting Windows 98 PC which was crashing as it booted due to too many IE shortcuts littering its desktop.
FireFox
Firefox has much the same features for working with favourites although the terminology is not the same. The main difference is you click on 'Bookmark This Page' and 'Manage Bookmarks under the Bookmarks menu to work with your page URLs.
There is an extra option when using the 'Manage Bookmarks' screen though and that is the ability to add a new separator. This is just another way to split off bookmarks and folders in to groups and doesn't really add anything useful beyond a nice horizontal line in the Bookmarks menu.
Possibly more useful is the icon on the right hand side of the column headings. Clicking on this allows you to view additional columns such as the date you created the bookmark and when you last visited the site it points to. You can also sort by any column should the urge strike.
Summary
Both Internet Explorer and FireFox have a rich set of options to help you sift, sort and group your favourites or Bookmarks allowing you to tame that big long list in to something far more manageable.
