Increasing Files in the Recent Documents List

The Office icon menu includes a list of your recently opened files. In previous versions of Excel, the default was to show four files in the list, and it could be increased to up to nine. In Excel 2007, the default is to show nine items in the list, and it can be increased to up to 50. If you increase this setting to 50 files, you can open any of the 50 recently used files simply by selecting it from the list.

To change the setting, you select the Office icon and then choose Excel Options, Advanced. In the Display section, you change Number of Documents in the Recent Documents List to the desired number of documents.

Excel 2007: The Recent Documents list now includes files that you open directly from Windows Explorer. In previous versions of Excel, you had to use the Open or Save dialog to add a file to the recently used file list.

If you share a computer and are concerned about the files in this list, you can spin the option down to 0 and then click OK. This will completely remove the 50 files from the list.

If you routinely open more than 50 documents, yet you have certain favorite documents, you can force those favorites to always be in the Recent Documents list. Here's how you do it:

1. If one of you favorite file is not currently in the list of recent documents, open the file.
2. Open the Office icon menu and then locate the item in the Recent Documents section. Click the pushpin icon that appears to the right of the filename. The pushpin turns green to indicate that this item is pinned to the menu.

Any item with a pushpin will always appear in the Recent Documents list. Unfortunately, the pinned items do not always appear at the top of the list. The top spots are given to the files that you have had open most recently. If you pin several files to the list and then never open them again, those files will eventually move to the last spots on the list. However, because they are pinned, they will never fall off the end of the list.

To unpin an item from the Recent Documents list, you click the pushpin icon again.