ChessBase 10 folder shortcuts

Take a look at the following illustration; see if you can spot anything unusual about it, something which looks strange compared to the database view in your ChessBase 10:

If you said "You have different databases than I do", you get a big "duh" and have to stay after school. If you see nothing radically different, then you already know this lesson -- well done! But if you said, "Hey! You have icons that look like folders!", then this ChessBase Workshop's just for you.

After you've been using ChessBase for a while, you're bound to accumulate and create a large number of databases. The illustration above is from a brand-new computer which hasn't yet had all of my databases installed on it, which is why the database pane looks a bit sparse. But two of the icons in the picture look different because they represent entire folders containing loads of databases; in fact, both of these folders come directly from the ChessBase Opening Encycopedia 2008 disk. Let's double-click on the Theory 2008 folder and see what happens:

Now we see icons for a ton of databases, all of which are contained within the Theory 2008 folder.

Using these folder icons can really help you organize your data if you have a copious number of databases. How do you create a folder icon in ChessBase 10? It's easy to do; the first step is to know the location (drive, folder, sub-folder) of the folder for which you wish to create an icon.

Once you know where the folder resides on your computer, you just go to the File menu, select "New", and then "Add folder shortcut" from the submenu:

After you've selected that command, you'll see the following dialogue appear:

You can use the "+" boxes to expand the view to include drives, folders, subfolders, etc. You just "drill down" to the folder for which you wish to create an icon:

Click the "OK" button and you'll have an icon for that folder on your ChessBase "desktop" in the database window:

Just double-click on this folder icon to see a display of all the databases in this folder (as we did for the Theory 2008 folder earlier in this column). Here you can open databases by double-clicking on them, or perform searches on databases, or any of the other myriad functions you'd perform while using a database which is just hanging around loose on your normal ChessBase desktop.

That leads directly into the next question: "How do I get back to my regular ChessBase desktop?" The answer lies in the lefthand "Explorer" pane in ChessBase's database window:

Simply click on the "My Databases" entry to return to your regular "top level" ChessBase 10 database view (as shown in the first illustration in this column).

Until next week, have fun!

© 2008, Steven A. Lopez. All rights reserved.