If you’re a Windows 7 user, you may have noticed that the default save folder for your libraries is “C:\Users<username>.local\AppData\Roaming.microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Library”. This is the location where your applications and files are stored. If you want to change this location to something else, you can do so by editing your registry. To do this, open the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon You’ll now see a value called “Default Save Folder” with a value of “C:\Users<username>.local”. Change this value to something else if you want. For example, if you want to change the default save folder for your libraries to “C:\Users<username>.org”, then you would use the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon You’ll now see a value called “Default Save Folder” with a value of “C:\Users<username>.org”. Change this value to something else if you want.

As an example, if you were to save a Word document using the Save As dialog, it would end up in your My Documents folder by default. But what if you would prefer that the files get saved somewhere else? Like one of your Dropbox folders, for instance?

Changing Default Save Location: Method 1

You can simply click the “Includes 3 locations” in the Open/Save dialog to make your way into the quick properties window.

From here, you can easily add or remove library locations, and if you right-click on one of them, you can choose “Set as default save location”. Useful!

Changing Default Save Location: Method 2

You can also head in Windows Explorer down to the Libraries section, right-click on any of the libraries, and choose Properties.

This will take you into the extended library properties window, where you can add or remove locations, and click the Set save location to set the default.

You’ll note in the screenshots above that I’ve included my Dropbox documents folder—this is a really great way to include your Dropbox folders in the default libraries, and set the default location as your Dropbox instead of the regular folders.

Note: while we used Documents library as the example here, this should work for all libraries.