Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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One of my biggest gripes about Windows and Office is that when you click on a word, excel, or PowerPoint doc (or acrobat doc) in Internet Explorer, those documents render in the browser pane. This is one of the biggest usability issues I face with Windows. Since you don't get the Application menus and so on it makes it very difficult to work with the document if you wanted to edit it (which is what I usually do). And if you do edit it, you are presented with a horrible dialog when you try and navigate away (and there is no easy way to do a File->Save As). Further I much prefer to view a PowerPoint slide deck in PowerPoint than use that wacky web way of navigating the slides. Finally, if you are a portable user, not having the document open in the respective Office application make it hard to manage offline.
Gus Perez documents how to fix this. But since I frequently “repave” my Windows boxes and use multiple computers I am loathe to do anything manually. So to save you the time here are the necessary registry settings to make IE behave the way that I expect it to. Save the text below into a notepad file and call it OpenOfficeDocsInOffice.reg and then double click that file. Save it in a place you can access and open it on every machine you use.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Word.Document.8]@="Microsoft Word Document""EditFlags"=dword:00010000"BrowserFlags"=dword:00000008
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Excel.Sheet.8]@="Microsoft Excel Worksheet""EditFlags"=dword:00010000"BrowserFlags"=dword:00000008
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\PowerPoint.Show.8]@="Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation""EditFlags"=dword:00010000"BrowserFlags"=dword:00000008
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Visio.Drawing.6] @="Microsoft Visio Drawing" "EditFlags"=dword:00010000 "BrowserFlags"=dword:00000008