I read or check about 12 different websites every morning, so I was looking for a way to open them all at once with ONE CLICK. Of course, you can create separate bookmarks for each, but I wanted a one-click solution to open them all in separate tabs so I wouldn’t miss any, …and I found the solution.
In Windows, there’s a simple little TEXT FILE you can create in Windows Notepad that works with Internet Explorer to do exactly what I wanted to do. You type some simple instructions and the URLs of the sites you want to open, and save it all with a “.bat” file extension, instead of “.txt”
By saving the file to my desktop and giving it the “.bat” extension, Windows turns it into a Desktop Shortcut that I can click to launch Internet Explorer (or any internet browser) and opens all the sites in the file in different tabs. Very slick.
Here are the steps to creating it….
1. RIGHT click on an empty area of your Desktop and select NEW, then “Text Document“.
This will open Notepad.
2. TYPE @echo off on the first line.
3. On the second line TYPE the word start then space, and “any-label-name-you-want”
followed by “http://www.any-web-address-you-want.com”
You can list as many websites to open as you want.
Notice the quotes around each statement.
Here’s an example of the text file.
Example of the text file to create
4. Click FILE, then SAVE AS, and save your new text file with any name to your Desktop, then also TYPE .bat as the file extension name.
The .bat file extension signals to Windows to make this file an executable shortcut rather than just treat it as a text file.
In the example above, I named my file “OPEN-ALL.bat”. You can name your file “anything.bat” .
Now when you double-click the desktop icon you just created, it will open Internet Explorer and open each of your websites in separate tabs!
5. A Convenient LAST STEP
You could now just use the shortcut on your desktop as your one-click solution, but I wanted it to also appear on my Internet Explorer shortcut bar. So… with my browser windows open, I dragged the desktop shortcut from the Desktop to the Browser shortcut bar, and VIOLA! …Internet Explorer sucked it right in.
Here’s an example of how I dragged my Open-All.bat file onto my Internet Explorer shortcut bar.
Example of dragging the batch file shortcut onto the IE window to create a shortcut there
Hope you find my shortcut handy!
Neil
Faith through the Roof CD from Sundaysoftware.com
If I create this batch file, can I copy it to another computer and it will work?
Hi Oliver.
Yes, you can copy it to other computers. It’s a simple text file with a .bat extension rather than a .txt extension.