Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
If you are a regular user of Visual Studio and you also use the Visual Studio Installer to create EXE and MSI installers for your programs then you sometimes may need to copy files to the ProgramData hidden folder.
Within Visual Studio Installer this option is not easily available to you like the User’s Desktop is for example:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 2 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/1-5-300x229.png)
However, you can carry this out by using the Custom Folder special folder.
Instructions
When you have opened your Visual Studio Installer project you should right click on the File System on Target Machine:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 3 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs2.png)
Then go ahead and click on the Custom Folder:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 4 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs3-300x224.png)
This will then create Custom Folder #1:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 5 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs4.png)
You should then go ahead and right click on the folder and click Rename:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 6 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs5-300x164.png)
Then rename the folder to ProgramData:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 7 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs6.png)
That is the folder structure part complete but you now need to change the folder properties to ensure that the DefaultLocation points to the correct folder as by default it points to [TARGETDIR]:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 8 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs7-300x195.png)
You will need to change the DefaultLocation to:
[CommonAppDataFolder]
So it should then look like this:
![Install files into ProgramData folder using Visual Studio Installer 9 Visual Studio](https://techygeekshome.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vs8-300x185.png)
You can then go ahead and add files and folders to this folder and they will be installed into the ProgramData folder.
Comments
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How can i set the write permission to a file inside this folder
How can i set the write permission to a file inside this folder