Have you ever downloaded a binary or file but are tired of searching for it hiding in some subfolder in your Document folder? Ever wonder how installed programs can be found in the start menu’s search? There is actually a simple solution!

Firstly, go to the following path by pasting it on your File Explorer’s path and press ENTER.

%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

Once you reach the folder, you will see all kinds of folders and shortcuts. You can decide if you want to create a subfolder to categorize them. Those shortcuts that are stored in the subfolders can be found in the start menu’s search too.

Next, open another File Explorer and go to the folder where the binary/file you are interested in creating a shortcut for. Right-click hold and drag the file to the start menu program’s folder. Select “Create shortcuts here”. You can one-shot select multiple files and create a shortcut.

Finally, rename the shortcut as the shortcut will have " - shortcut" in the filename.

For those who know about Python programming, you can run the following script in that directory to remove all the " - shortcut" substrings from all of the filenames. This will be helpful if there are too many files to manually rename them.

import os

for source in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
    # Remove " - Shortcut"
    destination = source.replace(" - Shortcut", "")

    # Renaming the file
    os.rename(source, destination)
print('Done!')

I hope these tabs have been helpful to you. Feel free to leave any comments below. You may also send me some tips if you like my work and want to see more of such content. Funds will mostly be used for my boba milk tea addiction. The link is here. 🙂