How to Install Proposal Kit on a Removable USB Drive - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show you how to install the Proposal Kit products and Propose Pack Wizard software on a removable portable USB drive. This feature allows you to put your entire Proposal Kit installation including the software, all the templates, all the project documents you create, all your editable Word documents, everything on a single portable drive you can travel with without having to take a full computer and plug that removable drive into any other computer that has Microsoft Word installed. Then you can run the Wizard on that computer, do a quick little setup and then be creating and editing your projects and have everything self–contained on the portable removable USB drive.

So we have a portable drive here, this is actually a half terabyte SSD portable USB drive and it's completely empty. We've named the drive portable and this is using the K drive now. Note that removable drives you probably are aware of will change drive letters depending on what computer you plug them into and your Windows operating system will usually pick the lowest available drive letter.

So one caveat to setting up Proposal Kit this way is you do have to use the same drive letter on every computer for that removable drive. Because of that you want to pick a drive letter before you do the installs of the Proposal Pack and Wizard and use the drive letter that's high enough up in the drive letter list that there's a good chance it'll be available on any other computer you're going to plug it into. So our operating system defaulted to the K drive that's part way down the list but you know that actually might be a used drive on other computers, especially if your computer mapped this to like an E drive, D drive or something low.

So we'll show you first how to change drives. This will differ between different versions of Windows. We're using Windows 11 here.

It's very similar to Windows 10 and they're just different screens you might be looking at. Consult your Windows help or online on how to change a drive letter on a drive. One thing you can do, you can just do a search on change drive letter and you'll probably find one of the operating system tools for changing drive letters.

So you'll see our portable drive here is K. I'll just click that go into properties. I'm going to change the drive letter and let's put it hot somewhere high in the list.

We'll make it the T drive. All right now we've renamed it from K to T and now we'll install the Proposal Kit and Proposal Pack Wizard. Now we're going to take one of our Proposal Pack design themes Travel #5, it doesn't matter which of our packages you have, and during the install we are going to change the drive letter.

You see the default it installs into, we want to keep the whole path, we just want to change the drive letter. So just change C to T in our case. Use whatever drive letter you've mapped to your removable drive do the installs.

Okay, we've installed the Proposal Pack. Now we'll install the Wizard and same thing as before keep the path but just change the drive letter. Okay, now we see the Wizard document opened.

We have all the desktop icons created. We can get rid of the installers. You would actually keep those backed up actually.

One thing to note if you do unplug this USB drive any shortcut links like this will temporarily be broken obviously because these point to files on that removable drive. You can leave these if this is a drive you're going to plug back into this computer say if you're traveling. Now we will run the Wizard and do the normal setup.

The Wizard can tell the difference between a removable drive and a non–removable drive like an internal drive. So it has detected the T drive is a removable USB drive and it'll give you some tips about setting the drive letter high which we already did. Another thing to note is the Wizard does create a small Windows registry key.

This is going to be something that has to be recreated on each computer that you plug the Wizard into and that's just going to hold a few paths and a few basic settings the Wizard needs when it's running. All right, now the Wizard is all set up and running. Let's create our first project just so you can see traveling with a project created that you can access on another computer.

All right, our document's been created. It's stored out on the T drive and here is our document. Okay now we'll show plugging this removable drive into a computer that doesn't have the Wizard installed on it and how that setup works and how to get the drive set up correctly.

Just to show you what the Wizard needs to create on the new computer, the registry holds a few key pieces of information. The Wizard keeps a backup copy of these settings on your portable hard drive so it can rebuild this registry on any other computer you plug it into. In the past you may have had to manually copy this registry and import it onto another computer if you're transferring your files you don't have to do that anymore if you used to be traveling with your Proposal Kit.

Okay, now we've plugged our USB drive into a new computer that does not have Proposal Kit ever installed on it. It doesn't have our registry. It does have Microsoft Office on it.

We'll show you how to set up the Proposal Kit on a new computer using your removable drive. You can see the portable drive on this computer is M, which is not going to work. We'll show you what happens if you try to run the Wizard now on the computer and set it up with the mismatched drive letters.

You can see this is our portable drive and we're going to start the 10s, you always want to start the 10s copy of the Wizard here because it doesn't have all the other third–party integration features enabled which may not exist on or won't exist on other computers either. This will be your baseline version you always want to start with. We will enable it, you'll always have to enable the macros on each new computer because you're telling Windows on the new computer that you're allowing the Wizard to run.

We will run the Wizard now we'll have to run the Wizard manually because there's no desktop icons created because we never installed it on this computer. You just go to the Add–ins tab, click RunWizard and it will see that the registry doesn't exist and it notices we are running it from a USB drive. Now it's going to go to the backup copy of the registry that's held on your remote drive and it's going to double check and it notices that you originally created it with the T drive but you are now trying to run it from an M drive and it won't let you continue until you change this.

So what we'll have to do is go change this M drive to a T drive and we'll just do that just like we did before. We'll bring up the drive management screen, we'll find the M drive and we will change this to T. If the computer you're plugging this into has that drive being used and it can't be remapped temporarily you might run into an issue there.

Okay, so now we've renamed the portable drive to the T drive and now we're back to the portable drive. Go into our ProposalPack folder and bring up the 10s copy again. Now we can run the Wizard again.

You will see that the database doesn't exist, the registry. The last system will ask to create the desktop shortcut icons. Now if this is a computer you're going to plug it into just once for some quick work you might want to skip creating the desktop icons.

If you're going to be switching between these computers more frequently then go ahead and create the desktop icons. This just prevents you from having to leave behind some icons you might forget to delete them on someone else's computer that are going to be broken when you unplug your removable drive. Now you can see the Wizard is running.

Now we've got it running on the new computer. We can go and edit the project we created on the other computer. This is the file we created originally right after that first install on the other computer.

You can see everything self–contained on this T drive and we have a running Wizard we can use on any computer. We can also go and create a whole new document, create a new project. All right now our second document's created on this new computer and again it's stored out of the T drive just like it had been created on the other computer.

That is how you install Proposal Pack and Proposal Pack Wizard on a removable drive to switch between computers without having to travel with a full computer.