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IE11 "Save As" dialog can't see most folders


JorgeA

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I have a neighbor who just bought a new Windows 10 PC (that was his first mistake :) ) and I've been helping him to transfer his applications and set up the computer.

Yesterday we ran into a bizarre problem. He uses Acrobat X Standard to convert Web pages to PDF from banks and other accounts. The Adobe plug-in for IE11 seems to have carried over OK to the new computer, except that when he goes to convert a Web page to PDF, the "Save As" dialog will show him only a small subset of the available folders and files under Documents. The only workaround I've come up with is to manually type the path to the folder where he wants to save the file; in that case, IE seems to remember it as a choice the next time he performs the same operation. But obviously this quickly gets tedious if he wants to save files in different places, and in any case the other PDF files in those folders won't show up, so he can't tell ahead of time if he's giving an existing name to a new file.

I've looked around the Web for reports of similar experiences, but nothing's turned up yet that sounds like the issue that he's run into.

What makes this situation strange is that Adobe on IE11 appears to be the ONLY combination that's having trouble listing all the files and folders in the Save As dialog. If he tries to convert a Web page using the Adobe extension in Firefox 43, all the expected files and folders show up fine and he can navigate to the specific folder where he wants to save the PDF in question. If he saves the page as an XPS document in IE11, the available files and folders show up properly in the Save As dialog. Even if he uses the built-in "Print to PDF" function in Microsoft Edge, he can see the other files and folders in the Save As without having to type them out by hand. But not Adobe Convert Webpage to PDF in Internet Explorer.

What the heck could be going on, and how might we resolve this? I hope that the information above has provided enough clues for someone sufficiently expert to figure it out.

Thanks in advance.

--JorgeA

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sounds like part of the "modern" trend to avoid showing people things that would overload their poor little minds.

I don't have a proposed solution, and this post doesn't really address this particular problem, except that if the hard drive all shows up it might provide a "big picture" workaround that could help the user not stumble into the problem to begin with.  "Gettin' geeky with it" can quite often overcome "dumbing down syndrome"..

My advice: 

Ask the user learn habits that simply keep him/her away from the newer things that don't really work.  In general I always advise not to use "Libraries" at all.  In my experience, doing things "the prescribed way" has to be replaced by rigor if you want things to really work.

In short:  Avoid any of the abstractions and always use hard drive folders.  Get in the habit of navigating to C:\Users\name\Documents or wherever you want, and it's hard to go wrong.  It avoids things that have been added since about the time of Vista that have never worked very well, and continue to have the same shortcomings even in the most modern Windows.

I personally go to some lengths to tweak Windows to show me as little of the new fangled junk (Libraries) as possible.  When I open Explorer I see the following (note what's not displayed in the left pane):

Win10Explorer.png

-Noel

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Thanks, Noel. That's a nice setup you've devised there.

I don't care for these abstractions, either -- ever since Windows 98 and the "My Documents" thing you could have heard me occasionally screaming, "Just show me where the d*mn files actually sit!!!"

The best approach we were able to find for my neighbor was that idea of manually typing the full path in the navigation box (? - I forget what it's called). In all the other combinations of applications and formats that I listed above, you could click your way to the desired folder, but not with Adobe on IE11. With that combination, you have to type the path.

One mitigating factor is that afterward it does seem to remember that path, so I imagine that over time all the different places where he stores PDFs will become click-accessible, but in the meantime it's tedious extra work.

And it's strange.

--JorgeA

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