Last week one of my clients experienced a hardware failure on their main computer. It’s a computer user's worst nightmare and occurred in the middle of an important week of work. Long story short, I was able to source a new hard drive and install it within 24 hours. Luckily the client had a backup schedule in place and so the restore process could begin. Unfortunately, the backup did not include Windows customisations and so I needed to recreate several folder shortcuts on the Taskbar.

Most users will have the File Explorer folder pinned to the Taskbar, however, this only takes you to the Quick Access folder list. If you want to create a shortcut to a specific folder then follow these steps:

  1. Firstly you will need to create a shortcut to the folder, the best way to do this is so you can find it easily is to create it on the Desktop
  2. Minimise any applications you have open so you can see the Desktop area, you can use the shortcut Windows key + D on the keyboard
  3. Right mouse click and select New > Shortcut
  1. The Create Shortcut window will appear:
  1. Click Browse and navigate to the specific folder you wish to create the direct shortcut to
  2. In my example, I’m going to create a shortcut to my blog content folder which is located within the Documents folder. Select the folder and click OK.
  1. The folder’s path will now be added in quotation marks to the Create Shortcut window
  2. Place your cursor before the folder path and type explorer so that Windows know which program to open this shortcut with (make sure you don’t accidentally delete the quotation marks)
  1. Click Next
  2. Now give the shortcut an appropriate name then click Finish
  1. The shortcut should now be displayed on your desktop
  2. You will see the shortcut has the default icon of the cream coloured folder, to customise this so your shortcut will stand out, right mouse click the shortcut and select Properties
  3. Click the Change Icon button
  4. Select a different icon from those displayed
  5. Click OK twice to return back to the desktop
  6. Now using the left mouse button, click and drag the shortcut to the Taskbar area
  7. When you see a prompt to Pin to Taskbar, release the mouse button
  1. Your custom folder shortcut will now be pinned to the Taskbar
  2. You can now delete the original shortcut from the desktop
  3. Test out the new shortcut which should take you directly to the folder you specified


Reference: https://www.thetraininglady.com/folder-shortcut-taskbar/