Displaying a workbook's full path

One of the great things about modern computers is the amount of data that you can store on their hard drives. I mean, they are absolutely immense compared to what you could buy even four or five years ago. The downside is that you have to create folders within folders, within folders, to store and organize all that data, and it can be difficult to tell people where to go on a hard drive and even harder to write it out. In this movie I will show you how to find the folder that a particular file is stored in, and copy it quickly. As my example, I will use the FullPath sample file, which you can find in the Chapter 3 folder of your Exercise Files archive.

To get the address of a file you need to display the Save As dialog box, and the quickest way to do that is to press the F12 key. So I'll press F12, and when I do, I get the Save As dialog box. Now I will move the mouse pointer up to the address bar, which tells you which folder you're in, and click the folder icon at the left edge, and that's this image here. When I click it, the contents in the address bar change to display the path to the current folder, and you can see it's currently selected and highlighted in blue.

Now I just copy that text, and I am done with the Save As dialog box, so I can click Cancel to close it. Now I have copied the path to the folder into the clipboard so I can paste it into my workbook. So I'll click cell E2 and paste, and when I do, I get the full paths of the folder that contains the file. And then if I want to edit it to add the file name, I can just double-click the cell to start editing and then click to the right of the existing value, type a\, and then FullPath.xlsx, and press Return.

So now if I need to tell anyone where to find the file, perhaps in an email, or if I am programming in Visual Basic for applications and I want to give a reference to the file, all I need to do is use this string and I can tell people or programs exactly where to look for it.