Why won't Excel 2013 work as an "Open With..." program in Windows 7?

I just recently uninstalled Office 2010 32-bit and installed Office 2013 64-bit on my computer. I was sent some text files that are tab-delimited, so I want to open them with Excel.

I am trying to add Excel to the Open With... option in the right-click menu in Windows 7. Every time I try, I open the selection screen, browse to Excel.exe in the Office15 folder and press OK, but it refuses to stay as an option on the selection screen.

I know that I can open Excel and then open the file, or even drag-and-drop it onto Excel, but seeing as I'll be opening a lot of these files over the next few weeks, I'd really rather add it to the right-click menu (like I used to do all the time).

Any ideas as to why it won't allow me to open that way or how to fix it?

Solution 1:

Finally figured it out. It was directly related to the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit. Poking around the registry I found the following key was wrong:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\EXCEL.EXE\shell\open\command\(Default)

Within this key was the following "old" value:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"

When I changed it to the correct, new location for Excel, it started working immediately.

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"

Solution 2:

you're right on the mark, but mileage may differ..

That is, the correct registry value in my case is:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"

And yes, it started working right away. Awesome!

Solution 3:

Press Win+R and type regedit. Then open this:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.txt\OpenWithList

and add new value in that place. there must be a, b, ... so you name your value c if you have a,b. Put this text "EXCEL.EXE" without quotes into a value data and see if this work.

Bee careful with registry things!