Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Commercial, Freeware
ActualDoc: Replace the Recent Documents feature in Windows
by Brad Linder Feb 20th 2008
The Recent Documents feature in Windows can come in handy if you need to find a file you've used in the last few hours. But Windows only shows you the last 15 documents you've used, doesn't sort them by file type, and doesn't let you search your history. ActualDoc is a utility that will do all of those things and more.When the program is minimized to your system tray you can right click on its icon to bring up a menu that's basically a supercharged version of Recent Documents. You can see all of your most recently used files, just the Office, PDF, and TXT documents, multimedia files, or images.
You can also customize launch the main program window which shows all of the same files, but also gives information like file size and where they're located. ActualDoc also includes a document explorer which lets you view the contents of supported file types.
ActualDoc comes in two varieties, a standard edition which is free and a pro version which sells for 19.95 Euros, or about $30 US. The pro version comes with a graphics editor, and a viewer which can read Office and PDF documents as well as a file search utility.
Users can also password protect their history. But that's only useful if you disable the built-in Windows Recent Documents feature. Otherwise anyone who uses your computer can still access your history. You can find instructions for disabling Recent Documents in Windows after the jump.
[via Techie-Buzz]
- Select Run from the Windows Start Menu
- Type "regedit" into the run box
- Find the entry marked Hkey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
- Created a new DWORD Value called "NoRecentDocsHistory"
- Double click on your new DWORD and change the value data to 1
- Save and exit
When you reboot your computer Windows will no longer track your recent documents history.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mjhinton said 3:09PM on 2-20-2008
Type "shell:recent" in Run (Win+R) or in Start search. Opens a list of all your recent docs. View, sort & group as you like. Create a shortcut to do the same. FREE. peace, mjh
Reply
burnblue said 9:13PM on 2-20-2008
how can I sort by type? they're all shortcuts.
Thanks for the tip Brad. Whether or not we need them or have better alternatives, we keep reading Download Squad looking for useful stuff to download. The more we see, the more likely we'll find something irreplaceable
Bree said 8:53AM on 2-21-2008
On Windows XP, Just use Windows Exploder to navigate to the folder
C:\Documents and Settings\{UserName}\Recent.
Nothing ever seems to get deleted from it.
Reply
Joe said 10:49AM on 2-21-2008
Are there other "shell:" shortcuts? I tried goggling it and didn't have had much luck.
Reply
marsflip said 11:24AM on 2-21-2008
Great tip from mjhinton - I would go as far as saying that it was more useful than the article.
Reply
matt said 7:41AM on 3-28-2008
Yep, totally disagree with mjhinton. The "Recent" folder is a crazy mismash of obscure files/folders, and folder names have no path etc etc. ActualDoc (which I just loaded the free standard version of), does what Windows should have introduced back in '98 (still waiting, but hey, Vista looks nice so who wants functionality?). I can tell it what file types I want stored in my ActualDoc recent list (doc, xls, txt, no zips or obscure files some programme has decided it needs to access etc etc), filtering is easy, just click on a file type, which you may or may not need given than you've excluded most of the noise.
Sorry mjhinton, use before you criticise, otherwise you reduce the peace. ActualDoc Standard is free and better than Recent.
Reply