Everything You Wanted To Know About Favorites,
But Were Too Afraid To Ask
Teresa Pfeiff

Favorites. Not a color, not a day of the week, not just a flavor of ice cream anymore. If you use Internet Explorer, "Favorites" refers to website shortcuts, organized into a slick little sidebar or dropdown menu. Learn to use your Favorites feature, and Internet Explorer will remember website addresses for you, so you can access them later ('later' being when your boss isn't looking.).

Netscape users call these shortcuts "Bookmarks." You're welcome to call them whatever you want, but generally using one or the other (as opposed to "those little thingies on my sidebar") will make sure you don't get odd looks from any savvy Internet users.

Some people like to have their Favorites listed on the left hand side of the screen when Internet Explorer is open. To do this, click the Favorites icon on the tool bar. To close it, click the X in the upper right hand corner of the side bar.

To add a website to your Favorites, simply go to that webpage. Click on "Add to Favorites…" This is located at the top of your Favorites listing, if you do not have them listed on the left then click on the word Favorites in the menu bar and then click "Add to Favorites…" This should be the first item in the drop down menu. A box appears…


From here you can either keep the name it is given, or rename it. Occasionally web pages don't have the title set up properly or the title is very long, and so to keep your websites individual and easy to find, I recommend renaming them. (In addition, you can give them misleading names to throw off anyone who might be using your computer. We'll never tell.) In the example above we are adding the Drake Hardware & Software webpage to our favorites. Instead of having it say, "Burlington Iowa Computer and ……" we want it to say Drake HS. To do this, highlight everything in the "Name" box and then type "Drake HS."

If we click "OK" then it will add Drake HS to our list of Favorites. However, if we wanted to be organized for some odd reason we could create a folder and place the favorite in there instead of having it just hanging around with the rest of the favorites. To create a new folder click the New Folder button. Name the folder as you wish and click "OK." Make sure the folder you want to place the favorite in is highlighted and then click "OK."

Once the dialog box returns you to the browser window, click on the word Favorites in the menu bar again to see if IE saved your new link.

If you have a long listing of Favorites, the one you just saved will appear at the bottom of the list. Your list may be so long that not all of it fits on the page, but if you look closely, you will see an arrow that points down. Place your cursor over that arrow, and the rest of your Favorites will appear. The last one you added will be at the bottom. Want these to appear to alphabetical order? No problem, right click anywhere on the list, which will open up a new option menu. From there, click "Sort by name."

Internet Explorer also makes it simple to import and export your Favorites, for the purpose of transferring them to another computer, or backing them up. To import bookmarks or favorites, on the File menu, click Import. A new dialog box will open to walk you through importing the new Favorites list. To export favorites to bookmarks or favorites on another computer, click on the File menu, click Export. This will create a Favorites file in the location that you specify, which you can then copy onto disk or other folder, to move to a new location.