In Windows, what determines if an opened document will become a "Recent Document"?

April 14, 2004 2:41 PM

In Windows (in my case, XP Pro, but this might be general), what determines if an opened document will become a "Recent Document"? In practice, it seems like roughly half the documents I open can be later found under Recent Documents, but I can't determine the rhyme or reason to what makes it and what doesn't.
posted by badstone to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

As far as I know, documents opened from Explorer will appear there, but opened from doing "File... Open" in the application won't. I'm not utterly certain, as the second thing I do to any new Windows installation is disable this feature, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
posted by majick at 2:43 PM on April 14, 2004

Response by poster: Also, why does it sometimes take a very long time for a File Open dialog to display the contents of My Recent Documents? Can I do anything proactively to make My Recent Documents work faster?
posted by badstone at 2:43 PM on April 14, 2004

Response by poster: This feature, if it was implemented better, would be extremely useful to me. The metaphor of stacks of stuff on my desktop, with the most recent things on top, works much better for me than files and folders, it's much more task-centric. Well, the files and folders should be there too so things can be put away when you're done with them.
posted by badstone at 2:46 PM on April 14, 2004

One thing I've noticed: files dragged and dropped into an application don't show up in there for me (at least on Win2K).
posted by yerfatma at 3:50 PM on April 14, 2004

I believe the files added to Recent Documents are the ones that you either open with explorer directly, or that are opened using a Windows' common open dialog (that is, the standard File->Open with the view that looks a bit like explorer). If you're using a program with a non-standard Open function -- many graphics programs, for example -- then the relevant API isn't used and so the file doesn't get added to Recent Documents.
posted by reklaw at 6:04 PM on April 14, 2004