Soon, this tip will become one of your favorites

Over time, my Internet Explorer Favorites list has gotten out of control. Although I have my Favorites organized into folders, now even my folder list is so long that I end up with the ever-so-slow scrolling problem.

For those who haven’t experienced it, when your list of Favorites (or folders of Favorites) gets really long, Internet Explorer puts a little down arrow at the bottom of the list to indicate that you need to scroll down to see the rest of the list. The problem is that this process is incredibly slow for some reason. The whole point of bookmarking a site is to give you quick access, so it can feel like it takes forever for IE to figure out the whole scrolling situation. The smaller your browser window is, the more likely it is you’ll be faced with scrolling tedium.

The key to avoiding menu scrolling is to use the Organize Favorites command. Clearly, I’ve reached the point where single-level folders aren’t enough anymore, so it’s time to start moving some of my Favorites folders into subfolders.

To start tidying up, choose Favorites|Organize Favorites. In the dialog box, on the left, you find four buttons in a group: Create Folder, Move to Folder, Rename, and Delete. On the right, you see a pane with all your folders and Favorite links. To organize your links, you need to create folders and subfolders. For example, I organize my Favorites by topic. I have a folder called Pet where I’ve placed various pet-related site links. That folder got so crowded, I created subfolders called Cats, Dogs, and Vet. To create a folder (or subfolder), you first click the folder where you want to add a new folder. Then click the Create folder button and give it a name. You can move links into it by selecting a link and clicking the Move to Folder button.

While you’re in neatness mode, it’s a good idea to go through and get rid of any links that no longer work. To do that, just click to highlight the link and press the Delete button. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to click a link to see if it works while you are in the Organize dialog box. One way to get around this problem is to choose File|Export and export your bookmarks. Go through the Wizard and tell IE to export your Favorites. It then creates a file called bookmark.htm on your hard disk. You can open up that file in another IE window and click the links to see if they work.