Good old-fashioned WordPad (that comes with virtually every Windows OS ever made) is a program I like to use. Really. I don’t need a spell checker or any fancy things like that. I just want a simple way to store written stuff, and Notepad doesn’t have word wrap and uses an ugly font, which makes it eternally annoying. All I want is to save my stuff in WordPad format and have it STAY that way. But unfortunately, I also have Microsoft Word installed on my computer. If I save anything in WordPad, the default is (once saved) to open it with Word. Word takes forever and a year to load, and generally bugs me. I like it for some things, but I don’t want my damn Wordpad files to automatically load with it. Does anyone know how to stop it from doing this? It’s been bugging me a lot! Sorry if I seem clueless – I’m usually better with computers, honest… Hope this is in the right forum.
I use a Mac, but I beleive Windows has some control panel that lets you assign .xxx to a specific application… “xxx” being whatever extension you wish. This may not help is WordPad saves documents as .doc. But then again, if’n you never use Word, than wouldn’t be a problem at all… if you need to use Word, you can re-assign the extension back.
Again, I use a Mac, so you’ll probably want a Windows user to confirm that this’ll work before trying it.
Open windows Explorer.
Find your Wordpad file (any one will do).
Right click on it. (Some OS’s need shift-right-click). A drop down appears.
One of the drop down choices is “Open with”. Click on it.
Wait.
An “Open With” window appears showing all your registered programs.
Scroll down to Wordpad, and highlight it.
A check box in the lower left corner says: “Always use this program to open these files”. Click it on.
Click OK.
Now Wordpad is your default.
Nutmagnet is mistaken (for WIN9X at least). The option OPEN WITH only appear if there is no program associated with that file extension. If the extension is already associated with a program (as in the OP) then the option is OPEN and it does the same as double clicking: Opens with the associated program.
SEND TO is the option you are looking for as it allows opening the same file type with different programs. I use it all the time with graphics files because I use several graphics programs and with other file types.
sailor, if you do a shift-right click it will show the “open with” option, as nutmagnet states.
if the extension is already associated with some program then just right click will show only the “open” option, but shift+right click will show the “open with” option.
Well, I am running Win98SE and it doesn’t happen on my computer but then again, I have installed Win9X dozens of times and it never comes out the same twice.
In hindsight it probably is shift+right click. My Win 98 machine is in the other room and I was too lazy to check. But either way, it does let you change the program associations using that method.
Notepad has wordwrap. Click ‘Format’, then check it.
It’s all I use on my computer. I hate how bloated modern word processing applications are. I have a 1.5 Ghz processor with 384 MB of RAM and it still takes forever for Word to open.
or more easily, without changing your file associations, save your files with the extension .wri - carryover from windows 3.1’s write.exe. .wri files open by default with wordpad.
You could use it to open binary files (like documents somebody had saved with some .ext scheme that made sense to them) and very often determine what program they belonged to.
If Word takes forever to open, check what’s loading with it. Go to Start/Run, and type “winword.exe /a” (without the quotation marks) and hit Enter. If Word pops up faster than lightning, you either have stuff in your Startup folder that’s taking forever to load, or you have bunches of weird macros trying to load. The /a tells Word to start in “clean” mode, where it just launches the .exe and bypasses the… eh forget it you don’t need all that crap.
In Explorer, go to Program Files/Microsoft/Office/Word and there should be a Startup folder. You can dump whatever’s in there and see if that helps. You might also want to search for normal.dot and rename it to normal.old then start Word. This will create a new normal.dot template, the template Word uses every time you create a new blank doc.
Sorry. I supported Microsoft Word in all flavors for about a year and a half. I must say, I wish all things in life had a /a switch…
joe_cool is correct about the .WRI extension. Unfortunately Wordpad doen’t make it that easy, If you put filename.WRI in the name box, it’ll add the .DOC and you’ll have a file called filename.WRI.DOC.
What you have to do is quote the name, that is, enter “filename.WRI” in the Save As box. The quotes tell Wordpad not to add anything else to what you entered.
Hope this is in the right forum.