Open All Your Apps & Files with a Single Click

Image by Fotis Fotopoulos

If you’re finding yourself opening the same applications and files every time you boot up your Windows PC or have a specific task to work on, automating this process might save you a significant amount of time and hassle in the long term. One reasonably easy way to automate a process like this is by creating and running “batch” programs. A batch program (which can also be called an automation script) is simply a list of commands, created in Notepad (or any basic text editor) and saved with the “.bat” filename. When you then double-click this .bat file to run it, these commands are executed.

To build a batch program which opens a list of applications and files, open Notepad and type your commands, each on a separate line:

Basic Structure

• Your first line should be:
  @echo off
  This prevents the command prompt windows from displaying when you run the batch file.

• To add a non-executable comment to the file, you can add “REM” (think “Remark”) to the front of one of your lines:
  REM This is a comment line to help explain your batch file

Applications

• To open Notepad and Calculator, add in:
  start notepad.exe
  start calc.exe

• If you are finding that this isn’t working to open the specific apps you need, you can try listing out the complete programme path, for example (including quotation marks):
  start "" "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

Files

• An example command to open a specific file (make sure you include the quotation marks) is:
  start "" "C:\Users\YourUsername\Documents\example.docx"

• The first set of empty quotation marks is where you would put any specialised commands for opening the specific file (or running an application).

Web Browser Tabs

• If you want to open your preferred web browser with specific websites ready to go, you can use:
  start chrome.exe "https://www.google.com" "https://www.dropbox.com/"

• This will open Google and Dropbox in separate tabs in Chrome. You can of course replace Chrome with whichever app you prefer to use.

Microsoft Store Apps

• Apps installed directly from the Microsoft Store pose a problem as they don’t have a normal Program Files path like other applications - you can still open them via a batch file but this requires some more steps.

• First, to find the special pathway of the specific Microsoft Store app, open the Run command window (⊞ Win + R), type in “shell:AppsFolder” and hit Enter. Find the program you want to launch, right-click it and create a shortcut on the Desktop.

• Next, find the new shortcut to the program, right-click it and find the Target path - an example for Microsoft To Do being “Microsoft.Todos_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App”.

• In your batch file, to open this path (using the Microsoft To Do example) add the line:
  start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.Todos_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App

Once you have all your commands ready to go, hit File > Save As and make sure you type “.bat” at the end of the file name. For example: “MyFirstBatchFile.bat”

To run the batch program, simply double-click it! If you need to edit the commands in the batch script after you’ve saved it, right click the file and choose “Edit in Notepad”.

Below is an example of the list of commands in a complete batch program. Feel free to simply copy-paste these lines into your own batch file and add to and edit as needed!

@echo off
start notepad.exe
start calc.exe
start chrome.exe "https://www.google.com" "https://www.dropbox.com/"
start "" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE"
start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.Todos_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App