Thursday, May 23, 2013

Fix Office File Associations for All users

I ran into a strange problem today. I installed Office 2007 Standard on a Windows 7 machine in the same way as I've done hundreds of times. For some reason something went awry this time. Any user other than the admin user, which I used to install the program, had Wordpad set to open all Office documents. Admittedly I only tested three other user accounts but all indications were that this would affect everyone. Since the Default Programs in Windows are set on a per user basis I couldn't very well just fix the associations manually. Instead I found the solution in an under-appreciated comment on this thread:

"Running winword /r corrected a similar issue I was having." - appdce

winword in this case is of course winword.exe which is located in the Office12 directory (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\winword.exe). Running this command once with an unprivileged user seemed to clear up the file associations for all users. Thanks appdce, wherever you are!

No comments:

Post a Comment