How can I get Microsoft Word to list all my documents in unabbreviated form?

Question

I have a million documents in Word. I want to clean out the ones I don't need. But when I go to "open", it lists the files abbreviatedly, so that I don't know what the full name is. I can't afford the time to actually open up each document. How can I get it to show me the full document name so I can decide whether I want to delete it without opening up the actual document?

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean by "abbreviated," but if you mean some of the letters are chopped off by the column separator in the File Open dialog box, you can fix that this way. Assuming you're already looking at the files in the Details View, which is the only one I can find that chops off letters, grab the divider between the Name column header and the next column header and pull it to the right. This will expand the Name column.



Hope that helps.

Answer 2

You don't have any documents "in" Word, you have documents you created *with* Word. Word keeps the names of last N number of documents you opened in the File menu (you can set the number), but you can't make that list wider (make your filenames and paths shorter).



If you're talking about the filenames when you open a document (File/Open), that's your hard drive, not Word. Change the column widths.

Answer 3

In Windows Vista you can View the files using large icons.

But they are not large enough to read the typing.

Right-click Start>Explore>Views>Large icons.

If you are referring to the name not being completely displayed, you can "widen" the list by clicking-and-dragging the right boundary of the Name field heading.

Suggestion: Under \Documents create Folders with Group names (i.e. \Friends; \Health; \Miscellaneous, etc.) and store each file in the corresponding folder, so you can classify your files. Next time it'll be easier for you to find a file.