Favourites or bookmarks are a method used by browsers for keeping track of the web pages that you use regularly. It is possible to store a favourite and then go back to that favourite whenever you need to, weeks months or even years later, without having to look too hard. You can also add them to particular folders; for instance you may be interested in sport, and keep all your sports favourites in a sports folder. This makes favourites easy to find and also helps keep the list short which is necessary because the favourites menu can only contain so many favourites before it gets awkward to use. There are also functions for renaming and deleting favourites. In addition certain browsers allow the assigning of shortcut keys for quick access.

‘Favourites’ is the term used by Internet explorer, whereas most of the other browsers use the term ‘Bookmarks’, however the two are more or less the same thing. This document will describe the use of favourites in internet explorer; however the techniques used for bookmarks in other browsers are very similar.

To add a web page to your favourites.

• First use Internet Explorer to browse to the page that you want to store.
• Click on the menu bar Favourites -> Add to favourites.
• When the dialog box opens, you may either change the name to something which describes the page more accurately or if you want you can leave it as it is.
• Click ok.

To use the added favourite.

• Open Internet Explorer and browse to some page. ( not the one which you previously stored in favourites).
• Click on the favourites menu. In the list the favourite which you just stored in the last section will be there, click on it.
• Your browser will go to that page.
• Jump to any other pages which are already in favourites. There are normally a few in there to start with so you can try them out if you wish.

To create folders in your favourites and add web pages to them.

• Click on the menu bar Favourites -> Add to favourites.
• When the dialog box opens, change the name if you need to and then click on the ‘create in’ button to open the bottom part of the dialog box. You can turn on and off this bottom section by clicking on the ‘create in’ button.
• Click on the ‘New folder button’; type a name and click ‘Ok’.
• The new folder will be created. Notice that the icon beside it shows that it is open.
• Create another new folder, name it and click ok.
• Now notice that the first folder icon shows that it is closed. If you click on it then the second folder icon will close and the first opens. The open folder also shows the selected colour around it.
• By clicking on either of the folders you just created, or on any other folders which you find in the box, you are determining which folder your favourite is going to be filed in. Click on the first folder and click ok. You can then check for the favourite in the favourites menu under the folder name you picked.
• Now go to a different web page and store that as a favourite in the second folder which you created. Exactly as above, except that there is no need to create a folder ( because you have already created it ). Simply select the folder from the list instead. But remember to have the bottom part of the dialog box open using the ‘Create in’ button.
• You can also Create folders within folders, for instance in your sport folder you might have separate football, snooker and athletics folders and inside the athletics folder you might have several subsets and so on.

Organising favourites.

• Click on the favourites menu and select organise favourites.
• In the dialog box which opens up there are several options.
• • Create folder is the exact same thing as the create folder in the add to favourites dialog box.
  • Delete and rename do exactly as they say. You can delete or rename any favourite or folder; just select it in the right hand column first. Renaming the favourite does not alter how it works in any way.
  • To use ‘Move to folder’, click on a favourite to select it. When you click on the ‘Move to folder’ button a new box opens up with a list of folders in it. Just click on the folder where you want the favourite to end up and click ‘Ok’. The favourite will be moved from where it is to where you selected in the box. The small ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs to the left of the folders signify that there are subfolders, so this is how you would access these, just click the ‘plus’ sign and the subfolders will display for you to select from, ‘minus’ closes the display.

Remember that if your computer breaks down then your favourites are one of the most vulnerable parts and along with your documents folder, emails, address book and desktop are things which you may miss if you are unfortunate enough to suffer hard drive failure or a major virus. These parts would also be erased if you needed to reinstall windows. This makes a good reason to get hold of and set up a good, easy to use backup program. Talk to your local pc shop. However if you want to just backup your favourites only, then you can navigate to the folder in the main drive at “\Documents and Settings\{your profile name}”. Copy the favourites folder to a cd or disk and you can replace it if you ever need to. You will need to make a backup copy regularly though otherwise you might end up with year old favourites having all the recent ones missing.