Changing file type associations on limited accounts

(In the following, I'm translating back from my Italian system, so some expressions may not be exactly word-for-word what you see on a US-EN system...)

I installed Windows Word Viewer to be able to open a *.docx file, and this worked fine. Only that the system reset the file-type association to WWV for all *.doc* files, including but not limited to *.docx.

Logging in as Admin, I was able to reset all the other *.doc types to OpenOffice Writer, as they were before. But on the limited accounts (my own, my wife, my son) the Change option in Folder Options > File Types was greyed out.

I could probably get around this by temporarily giving all 3 limited accounts Admin privileges, modifying the associations, and then changing all 3 back to limited accounts. But this seems unnecessarily clumsy and time-comsuming. (But I guess I'll have to sooner or later ... )

Can anybody suggest a more elegant and direct way of doing this, just for my curiosity?

Thanks and regards.

 

Check the options in Open Office. My guess is there's a place there where you can select which file types you want associated with it. Perhaps it will allow you to change them there?

 

Hi Zander, and thanks for the idea.

I've browsed around the options for OpenOffice, as you suggested, but didn't find anything useful.

I've gone ahead and solved it the long way round (post no. 1), but it was a looooong road, and I was hoping (for the future, and for other readers) that there might be a more elegant/convenient way to do this.

I guess sometimes you just have to knuckle down and bite the bullet.... (or whatever other metaphor we want to dig out!)

 

Sorry that didn't help any. I used to use Open Office but it's been a long time now. I thought for sure you'd be able to do it that way. Oh well, it was worth a look any way. The only other thing I could have suggested would to be to reinstall it and perhaps that would set the associations back but that's not a very elegant fix either. At least you got it done. Thanks for letting us know.

 

Now that I've done it all I think I've found the faster solution I needed: right-click the file, from the pop-up menu select "Open with..." (? "Open using... "), select the program you want to associate to the file type, and check the box "Always use this application ".

NB: as I said above, the exact wording in US-EN Windows may be slightly different from my xlation.

Ya live and learn...