How To Create a Recent Items Desktop Shortcut

Whether It's a document you've opened, a few Images that you've viewed or watching videos here and there, Windows automatically stores files In a few directories on your computer's hard disk, and displays them as Recent Items. Whilst they can be Instantly viewed In the Start menu & Taskbar, not everything Is accessible In the one location. As such, I will show you how to create a recent Items desktop shortcut that will contain the lot.


Before I begin, here's what I'm referring to. I use Notepad each and everyday and upon right-clicking the Notepad file In the Taskbar, my recent Items are displayed as per the Image below. In other words, these are my most recently-used files.

The same applies when I've accessed the Start menu, and clicked on the right arrow Icon. The recent Items that I've used pertaining to a software named WinRar are displayed.

It's quite evident that the recent Items list Is limited. Moreover, you'd need to navigate to quite a few locations to view those that you're after. To simplify the process, I will demonstrate how to create a recent Items desktop shortcut, that will contain almost everything In the one place. The process Is extremely simple, so without further delay, let's get this tutorial started.

Step One:

Navigate to your desktop, right-click on a blank area, and select New > Shortcut as shown below.

Step Two:

Next, In the Type the location of the Item field, enter the following command.

%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent

Then click Next to continue.

Step Three:

Now you need to enter a name for your shortcut. For the purpose of this tutorial, I've accordingly named mine Recent Items. When you've entered yours, hit Finish to finalize the process.

Step Four:

Upon navigating to my desktop, as you can see, the Recent Items shortcut has been created. Let's put It to the test In the next step.

Step Five:

After double-clicking the shortcut, my recent Items are located In the one directory. Have a look at the amount It contains as arrowed below. 150 Items In total.

Last Step:

If you want to get rid of all your recent Items In a flash without opening the shortcut, right-click It and select Clear recent Items list.

Final Thoughts:

At some point In time during your computational tasks, you will have the need to locate a particular Item that you've recently used. If you have no time to spare, the last thing you need Is to search In various places to try and locate It. By creating a shortcut, It's as simple as a double-click of the mouse.