I recently switched to Office X for the Mac and I'm having difficulty
circumventing a change Microsoft has built into its latest version.
When I open a document (excel or word) in any folder, and then choose
"save as", in older editions of Office, the DEFAULT WORKING FOLDER, or
DEFAULT FILE LOCATION, or DEFAULT WORKING DIRECTORY, would always be
the folder in which I am currently working.
For example: in the subfolder Hard Drive/Job Folders/New Apartment
Bids/Plumbing Estimates, If I were to open a Word or Excel document IN
THAT FOLDER ("Plumbing Estimates"), the "save as" option would ALWAYS
default to the "Plumbing Estimates" folder, thereby escaping having to
"re-file" a "saved-as" bid from this folder all over again, starting
with the "Desktop" on down through multiple folders, and so forth.
In the "default file location" option, under theOoffice preferences
menu you can "choose" a folder, rather than the default sent with the
program which is the "Documents" or "Desktop Folder"
So here's the question:  Can I type into the Default File Location
dialog box a path that will tell Microsoft Office X, to always go to
the folder in which I am working? It's probably something fairly
technical, as all support folks I know have come up short. Maybe
there's a "backdoor" way to tell Office to do this, or "more
technical" way?
I already know how the "default file location" works in EVERY OTHER
ASPECT so please don't tell me to "create a folder and then go there"
or some other thing.  This is a very specific question, and I only
want a very specific answer that will make my Office X do exactly what
I requested by default, without any extra steps each time.  So, if I
open an Excel Document in "Plumbing Estimates" and choose "save as",
it will DEFAULT to "Plumbing Estimates" automatically.  If I then move
over to and Excel document in the "La Jolla Golf Electrical Estimates"
and choose "save as" it will THEN AUTOMATICALLY DEFAULT to "La Jolla
Golf Electrical Estimates" and so forth.  Any more steps than this, is
EXACTLY WHAT I DON'T WANT TO DO.

Thank you!
/HARDRIVE/currentworking

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Request for Question Clarification by austin_trill-ga on 27 Jul 2003 22:36 PDT

This is annoying, isn't it?  I run into the same problem, and can't
tell you how many times I've opened my Documents folder to find all
sorts of surprises in there.  In researching your problem I haven't
found a built-in solution (there was some intimation that it could be
done with AppleScript, but nobody seems to have done it yet).  I did,
however, find shareware that purports to "quickly take you to recently
used and favorite folders."  It appears that the software puts an
extra toolbar on the save dialog, and recently used folders may be
accessed from it.  Not exactly the way it used to be, but less
time-consuming than digging through folders.  Would this solution work
for you?