The Client Support Blog

Our department received a call from a user who wished to have the full path of the document they were working on displayed in the title bar of Word or Excel.

After struggling to find an answer, I turned to Google and came across several steps to achieve what the user asked for. To my dismay, they all required creating macros to then be embedded in the document templates of the specific applications, namely Word and Excel.

I don’t think most users would be too keen on creating macros, especially when they could create potential security concerns.

Then I came across this link, which I credit 90% for helping to solve this problem. I modified it a bit and tested with other products.
       
Here are the steps:

1. Start the Microsoft product for which you wish to have the path displayed (for this example, Word).
2. Right-click anywhere on a toolbar. This displays a Context menu for the toolbars.
3. Choose Customize from the Context menu. This displays the Customize dialog box.
   You can also go to Tools –> Customize…
4. Click the Toolbars tab.
5. Click the New… button.
6. For the Toolbar name, make it Display Full Path and then click OK.
   A little window will pop up next to the Customize dialog box.
7. Click on the Commands tab.
8. In the Categories list (left hand side), choose Web.
9. Drag the Address command (the first one in the command list) to the new little popup window from step 6.
10. Click on Close.
11. Now drag the little popup window to a spot in the Menu bar just below the title bar and above "File Edit, etc…" at the top of the application.

Now when you open a document the full path should be displayed there.

I have been able to test and verify with the following products. It’s been reported to work for * 97 & up to 2003:

Word 2003, Excel 2003, Access 2003 (after opening a database), PowerPoint 2003

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 11:27 am and is filed under Excel, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.