Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

Icons are useful for quickly spotting which file is a Word document and which is a worksheet without having to look at the file extension. While helpful, there’s a problem in that there's no easy way to distinguish between often-used or special files and the rest of the pack. For once I'd like to customize the icons for the Word files I use every week -- a bright red dot, for example, instead of the "W" icon would make them easier to pick out in a list.

Luckily, there's IconChanger ($19.95). With this simple utility you can change the icon associated with an individual file. After installation, IconChanger adds a menu option to the right-click pop-up menu. Once IconChanger opens, it can search through your entire hard drive (or just the folders you select) looking for replacement icons and presenting them to you in a large window. A simple mouse click and the desktop icon or file icon is reassigned.

Besides changing the icon for an individual file, you can use IconChanger to replace the default icon for all files of the same type (thus, replacing the "W" icon for all Word files, for example, with something more colorful), and if you don't like your choice you can return to the default icon. IconChanger also lets you assign a different icon to a folder.

Since the list of available icons on your hard drive can be daunting, IconChanger lets you save your favorites in a special list. You can also specify the program search for icons only in files of a certain type, so that IconChanger only goes looking for icons in, say, .EXE files.

While it's certainly easy to change the icons on your desktop (right click, choose Properties, then click the Change Icon button), the default choice is the executable file of the program you're running. You'll have to browse around to find the file containing the icon you want, which can be extremely tedious. Good luck. IconChanger displays all available icons on a single screen -- that's all icons hiding in files (such as executable files) as well as standalone .ico files.

There are some limitations. IconChanger simply displays all the icons it finds. It makes no attempt to suppress repeating icons, so I found lots of duplicate icons (especially exclamation points inside yellow triangles) among the over 22,000 icons the program discovered on my system. Furthermore, each time you invoke IconChanger, it has to re-scan your hard drive for available icons (though it does remember those in your "favorites" list). Since hard drive scans can take quite some time, you'd be wise to use the "favorites" list.

IconChanger doesn't include an icon editor, so it's not the tool you want if you need to build icons from scratch. However, the company's Web site has links to several icon libraries that may have just the image you need.

The evaluation version of IconChanger can change no more than three icons and is limited to finding a maximum of 3000 icons. The registered version has no such restrictions. For more information, visit Shell Labs at http://www.shelllabs.com/.

-- James E. Powell

^ Top of page ^

If you like this newsletter, share the free edition with your friends and co-workers. Just point them to:

^ Top of page ^