Windows Vista: The Complete Reference (Complete Reference Series)

Technically a shortcut is a file with an .Ink extension. Less technically, a shortcut is a placeholder in your filing system. A shortcut has a definite position on the folder tree, but it points to a file or folder that is somewhere else on the folder tree.

The purpose of a shortcut is to allow an object to be, for most purposes, in two places at once. For example, you usually should leave a program file inside the folder where it was installed, so you don't mess up any of the relationships between it and its associated files. At the same time, you might want the program to be on the desktop, so that you can conveniently open files by dragging them to the program's icon. Solution: leave the program file where it is, but make a shortcut pointing to it, and place the shortcut on the desktop. When you drag a file to the shortcut icon, Windows opens the file with the corresponding program.

Maintaining multiple copies of documents on your system is both wasteful of disk space and potentially confusing-when one copy gets updated, you could easily forget to update the others. And yet, files often belong in many different places in a filing system. If, for example, Paul writes the office's fourth-quarter report, the document may belong simultaneously in the Paul's Memos folder and in the Quarterly Reports folder. Putting the document itself in Quarterly Reports and a shortcut to it in Paul's Memos solves the problem, without creating multiple copies of the document. Clicking the shortcut icon opens the associated document, just as if you had clicked the icon of the document itself.

You can recognize a shortcut icon by the curving arrow that appears in its lower-left corner. A shortcut icon otherwise looks just like the icon of the object it points to: a document, folder, or application. A shortcut can be on your desktop or in a folder. A shortcut to the Word document Revenue Data.doc looks like this:

You can create, delete, move, copy, and rename shortcuts from Explorer windows, just as you would any other kind of file (see "Working with Shortcuts" later in the chapter).