Wednesday, 20 August 2014

Create, rename or remove a desktop shortcut in Windows

Desktop shortcuts are a very important feature in windows operating system, they can be almost anything including your favorite software, regularly-used documents, folders with music or photos, files and more. Sometimes we may create a shortcut for some of our favorite programs for us to have easy access, some other times while the installation process of a program goes on there is a Command prompt that asks for creating shortcuts in the desktop background... Whatever way the case may be, there are 2 simple ways to create a desktop shortcut, we are going to see how to.
As i have mentioned before, the desktop shortcuts can be just any file, any application or any folder on your PC. So, the steps for each will surely differ slightly but note that the main/basic procedures remains the same..

lets see how the first method looks like, Well the first thing to do is to locate the program by clicking on the start menu or windows button, all programs and then select the program, if the program is among your recently used program, then click on the microsoft windows button and locate the program there.. After locating the program, all you need to do is to click and hold and drag the program to your desktop and drop it there, while dragging the program you will see something below it like, Drag link to desktop, thats all shortcut created...
(see image)



The second way is quite easy, but it applies to folders and files, lets see how it goes
    The first step is to locate the file/folder as usual, then Click on the file's icon and right click on it, next thing to do is to click on Create shortcut from the list of options displayed, then left-click on Desktop (Create Shortcut).


Either ways your shortcuts is sure to appear on your desktop background

One noteworthy thing about this topic is actually the difference between a shortcut and an actual file's icon, most times people tent to delete an actual file thinking its the shortcut, ofcource deleting a shortcut is no big deal but when a computer user tempers with just one of the files making up that program, i dont need to say the result, we all know its gonna be a problem to the user and to that particular system or application software as well.

Its no big deal if we have decided to change the name of a created icon, how may we do this?
Simply right-click on the created shortcut's icon, Click on rename, Give it a new name by typing and press the enter key, We could also click on the created shortcut's icon and then press F2, after which we type the new name.

We can delete a shortcut file by simply pressing the Delete key and accepting yes.

note: If you delete a shortcut or if you accidentally delete a file it will be moved to the recycle bin, from which you could restore it if required. 

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