Add Dropbox As A Place In Office

If you have been using office 365 you would have noticed now it is designed to seamlessly work wtih Microsoft SkyDrive Cloud Storage service. So when you click on Open or Save As you get to see a nice logo for SkyDrive and access the Cloud Storage directly. But when you go to Add a Place you can only find Microsoft Services and not services like Dropbox and Google Drive. You can still browse to your dropbox or google drive by searching your hard drive for it, but why not make it easy. Microsoft isn’t going to include access to competing services right out of the box, but that does not mean you are not able to add it yourself.

With “Add a Place,” I naively thought, “Cool, I can add places like Dropbox and Google Drive.” Using MS Office 2013 out-of-the-box, as it turns out, you cannot do this perfectly reasonable action. How Can I add DropBox as a 'Place' in Office 2016?Helpful? Please support me on Patreon: thanks & praise to God, a. Dropbox is a great service to save, share and store files and folders. Here’s a time saver that lets you save Microsoft Office documents directly to your Dropbox. Here I’m saving an Excel. Require Application Add-ins to be signed by Trusted Publisher Check this box to have the Trust Center check that the add-in uses a publisher's trusted signature. If the publisher's signature hasn’t been trusted, the Office program doesn’t load the add-in, and the Trust Bar displays a notification that the add-in has been disabled.

I tried to use SkyDrive and found that simple issues like a file name being too long created sync errors and crashed the service to the point where I would have to reset the entire data that was in it to correct the situation. After six of my clients continued to have issues with SkyDrive failures I directed the majority of my clients to Dropbox. Some found Google Drive workable as well. So now, how do we get access to a shortcut to those services right in our open / save as window?

First off the way to do it is complicated and includes changing info in your registry. So of coarse rather that directing people to try to do that on their own, someone made a script. As always we cannot warrent the quality of a third party script, but it worked for me just great. At the end of the article I will include links to both the Dropbox script and the Google Drive script.

Office

Download the file to your computer and run it. It will ask you for the location of the dropbox local path. If you do not know what that is STOP and have a professional help you. Otherwise, go ahead and enter the local path and press enter. The script will then run a number of commands adding the service to the registry settings and now be avaiable to be added to Office 365.

Next you need to actually add the Drobox or Goggle Drive service to your Office 365. First open Word and select the Account Options under file. Select Add a service near the bottom of that window and move the mouse to Storage and select either Dropbox or Google Drive depending on which script you ran. And that is it. The next time you use any Office application, you will see that Cloud service in the list under the Open or Save As dialog box.

Now here is the kicker. As great as it is to see all your stuff in Dropbox available in Office 365, you do have to ensure if you are using more than one computer, that you do this to each computer BEFORE you attempt to access any file from that service. Otherwise you get some errors and Microsoft attempts to fix it for you. (which it will not fix)

Microsoft did release instructions on how to intergrate any cloud storage service into Office 365 and if you are so technically inclined feel free to read all about it here.

Now as promised here are the links to the scripts to install.

Dropbox

Google Drive

Again if you are not comfortable in doing this yourself hire a professional. Your Computer Solutions offers to provide remote services at affordable prices to handle your computer issues. You can call the office at 407-826-0810.

Now enjoying having your favorite Cloud Services inside of your Office 365.

When using the Save, Open, Attach File and Insert Picture dialogs in Outlook (and other Office applications), I usually need to browse quite a bit to actually get to the location where I want to be.

Would it be possible to add shortcuts to my own locations in these dialogs?

This is possible, but exactly how to do this depends a bit on your version of Outlook and Windows and, to make it even more confusing, the combination of the two matter as well.

There is a Favorites or Quick Access section provided by Windows that you can use and older versions of Office have a Places Bar which you can customize. Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016 have a “hidden” Places Bar as well which you can only customize via the Registry or by using Group Policies.

Quick Access or Favorites section in browser dialog of Windows

When using Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2016 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10, the browser dialog is provided by Windows instead of Office.

To add your own folders to the Quick Access or Favorites list on the left, browse to the folder in the right pane and drag and drop it into the Favorites list.

Another way to go (except on Windows Vista) would be to open the folder and then right click on the Favorites icon and choose: Add current location to Favorites.

When the dialog comes up, and you don’t see any locations on the left side, press the “Browse Folders” expansion button in the left bottom corner.


Make sure you drop it exactly between the icons to add the folder as a link. (click on image to enlarge)

Note: In newer versions of Windows, you might not have the “Recent Items” or “Recent Places” in your default list of Favorites. To add this folder, browse to:
C:Users%username%AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindows and drag & drop the Recent Items folder into your Favorites section.

Office specific locations in browser dialog of Windows

When you are using Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2016 on Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10, then you might have noticed that all the way at the top of the browser dialog, there is an Outlook icon showing as well.

Although this icon is actually intended for administrators to add (corporate) locations via Group Policies, you can also add them manually via the Registry.

These locations will then be available in all Office applications directly under their application icon. This allows you to add Office specific “favorite locations” which might not directly make sense in the Favorites section of Windows.

For instance, you may have a Favorite in Windows pointing to your OneDrive or Dropbox folder but in Office it might make more sense to have a direct link to the Documents folder within your OneDrive or Dropbox folder to save yourself an additional click.

Other examples which might apply to you as well are:

  • Your Templates folder.
  • Your pst-files folder.
  • A link to a folder where you often save attachments to.
  • A link to a folder on a network share like a team folder or a project folder.
  • A link to a folder containing personal ClipArt images.


Favorite locations for Office show up directly under the application icon. (click on image to enlarge)

Adding them via the Registry can be a bit of a chore though and some Registry Editor knowledge is required before you want to attempt this.

  1. Browse to or create the following path in your Registry:
    HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftoffice<version>commonopen findadminaddedplaces
    Note the space between “open” and “find”.
  2. Add a new Registry Key (Edit-> New-> Key) called: place0
  3. Add a new String Value (Edit-> New-> String Value) called: name
  4. Add a new String Value (Edit-> New-> String Value) called: path
  5. Double click on the “name” entry you just created and in the “Value data” field, type the display name (this doesn’t have to be the same as the folder name) for your shortcut and press OK.
    Examples:
    • Templates
    • PST-Files
    • My Projects
  6. Double click on the “path” entry you just created and in the “Value data” field, type the location for your shortcut and press OK. These paths can also contain environment variables like %username%, %appdata% and %homepath%.
    Examples:
    • %appdata%MicrosoftTemplates
    • D:RobertDocumentsOutlook Files
    • servernamesharenameprojects
  7. Repeat step 2 to 6 to add any additional locations but increase the “place” number. e.g.: place1, place2, place3, etc…
  8. The locations should be visible directly in all your Office applications. If not, restart the Office application and try again. You may also need to click on the icon or expand the list first in order to see them.


Adding custom places via the Registry. (click on image to enlarge)

Note: Unfortunately, the Recent Items folder and some other special folders can’t be added to this list.

Group Policy location:
To set it as a Group Policy, you can find the setting in the following location within the Group Policy editor:

User Configuration-> Administrative Templates-> Microsoft Office 2010/2013/2016-> File Open/Save dialog box-> Places Bar Locations

My Places Bar in the browser dialog of Office

The browser dialog from Office itself holds a My Places bar on the left side of the dialog. You’re likely to see this dialog when using Outlook 2003 or previous or when using a later version of Outlook on a Windows XP computer.

Add dropbox as a place in office 365Dropbox

To add your custom folder locations to it, browse to the folder in the right pane and select it (but do not open it). Then click on the Tools button in the top right corner of the dialog and select: Add to My Places.

To remove the location again or change the location order, right click on the location within the Places bar.

How To Add Dropbox To Office 365

Extra tip: To be able to see more locations without scrolling, right click within the My Places bar and choose: Small Icons.


Adding a custom location to the Places Bar in Office 2003 on Windows XP. (click on image to enlarge)

Add Dropbox As A Place In Microsoft Office Mac

Note: Not all Open and Save dialogs may have the Tools button and adding a location to one dialog will not affect all dialogs.