- Recovering More of Your Work with a Shorter AutoRecover Interval
- Automatically Saving Your Work Frequently
- Closing a Document Without Saving
- Closing All Your Open Documents
- Making Backups as You Work
- Showing More Items on the Recent Documents List
- Opening the Most Recently Used Document at Startup
- Clearing the Recent Documents List
- Creating and Opening Document Workspaces
- Automatically Prompting for Document Properties
- Creating a Trusted Location for Documents
- Viewing Total Editing Time Updated in Real-Time
- Calculating Billable Time Charges
- Locking Document Formatting
- Preventing Untracked Changes
- Setting Up a Document for Structured Editing
- Inspecting a Document for Personal Information
- Viewing Two Documents Side by Side
- Updating All Fields Automatically
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Clearing the Recent Documents List
The Recent Documents list is great for quickly reopening files you've worked with recently, particularly because you can increase the size of the list, as described earlier. It's not so great if other people have access to your computer because then they can easily see what you've been working on, and if you've been working on documents that contain sensitive data, the Recent Document list just makes life a bit too easy for a snoop. To increase security, you should remove sensitive items from the Recent Documents list. You can do this either by removing specific documents or by clearing the entire list.
To remove a single item from the Recent Documents list, follow these steps:
- Press Ctrl+Alt+-. (Use the dash on the upper row of the keyboard, not the one on the numeric keypad.) The mouse pointer changes to a horizontal line.
- Click the Office button.
- In the Recent Documents list, click the document you want to clear.
For maximum privacy and security, you might prefer to clear the entire Recent Documents list (say, at the end of the day when you're done working or when you are leaving your desk for an extended time). You can do this by running the procedure shown in Listing 3.7.
Listing 3.7. A Procedure That Removes All Items From the Recent Documents List
Sub ClearRecentFiles()
Dim rf As RecentFile
For Each rf In Application.RecentFiles
rf.Delete
Next 'rf
End Sub