File Associations
Teresa Pfeiff-Naughton

Have you ever installed a new program on your computer, such as photo editing software, just to have it take over all your photos? If you have several programs on your computer that perform similar tasks to files with the same extension then you may encounter a file association problem. File association is what the Microsoft Windows operating system will use to open a specific file. The file is correctly associated to the proper program by the letters that follow the "." in a file name, such as .wpd which is associated to Word Perfect, or .doc which is associated to Microsoft Word, or .xls which is associated to Microsoft Excel. There are thousands of file extensions used in Windows and sometimes several different programs can be used to manipulate files with the same file extension. That is when we encounter file association problems.

This problem occurs most commonly with both photo and music files. The program that these files will use is dependant upon what software you have installed and which program you wish to use to open your photos or music. You can change the program a file is opened with by right clicking on that file and placing your mouse on top of the "Open With" choice, then a pop up menu appears and the most common programs are listed. If the program you want to use is listed then left click it once. This will open this file using the program you selected this one time, it won't always open it with this program unless you change the file association.

To change the file association completely you right click on the file, choose "Open With," and then left click once on "Choose Program" to bring up a box with several programs to choose from. In this box you can tell Windows to always use the program you are selecting to open files with the same extension by checking the box, "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file."

If you try to open the file with a program that isn't compatible with that file extension you will receive an error.

Don't confuse this with converting data, which is changing the actual format of the file. The above is keeping the data in its same format but just associating it with another program.