Options for opening documents

Anyone who has elementary computer literacy can open a document, whether it’s Excel or some other file. Excel 2013 brought several novelties that, even in doing this simple operation, make daily work easier. These are options for creating shortcuts to the most frequently used documents in the menu and opening a copy of an existing document. More detailed, in the text that follows …

If you enter the Backstage View, by clicking on the File tab, and selecting the Open option in the main part of the window, you will first see a selection of locations where you can find documents and then the documents themselves at those locations. After installation, Excel will offer you the option to open recently used documents (Recent Documents), files in the OneDrive repository (OneDrive) and files on your computer (Computer). The last option Add a place is to add new locations, which may be a OneDrive account or location on the SharePoint portal.

Let’s focus on opening recently used documents! If we click this option to the right of the window, the names of the recently used documents and their locations will be displayed. If we are positioned above one such name, it will be marked with a light green bar, and on the right side of this bar, an icon that resembles a pin (Pin) will appear. By clicking this icon, you add the selected document to your favorite locations. Each time you re-open Excel, you will be able to see these documents among your favorites at the top of the list of documents. If we right-click on one of these documents, a context menu will open that offers several options for manipulating the document. First, we can open it, remove it from the list of favorites (Unpin from list), remove completely from the list (Remove from list) or we can remove all those documents that we opened earlier and we did not add them to favorites (Clear unpinned Workbooks). The last option might be useful if we are starting a new project, so we want to see the documents that we opened earlier, but that Excel still remembers your favorites.

A particularly interesting option is the one that allows us to open a copy of the document (Open a copy). On the basis of an existing document, it creates its identical copy, which is different only by the name to which an ordinal number is added. For example, if the document was called “plate.xlsx”, a new copy will be called “plate1.xlsx”. It reminds a little about the Save As option, but it differs in that we do not have to open a document, but we make its identical copy.

In this menu, you can also find the Copy path to clipboard option. This option copies the path to the document found in the temporary memory (Clipboard), which can later be used to locate the folder where it is located. For example, if the practice in your company is to store documents in a single location for storing data (for example, File Server, SharePoint Server, OneDrive), you can “paste” this path in the e-mail to send your colleague’s information file to work together.