Office 2010 Home and Student, Unable to “Open With” Word, Excel etc.
A customer just brought in a machine to be reformatted, and asked us to put Office on it for him. However as of now we are still waiting for our first retail copies of Office 2010 Home and Student to arrive. Thinking I was clever I installed the trial version from the Microsoft Website and figured I’ d pop the key in as soon as the final version arrived. Immediately something seemed bizarre. The Start Menu Group for Office 2010 had (English) appended to the end of it. I right clicked on the executables and realised they were pointing to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Virtualization Handler\CVH.EXE” What the hell I think. Why is Office being Virtualised? Apparently this is a product of the use as you download feature of the Digital Download, they use an application virtualisation layer to allow you to use the app while it downloads all of the features. However this causes an unexpected problem, there is no easy way to open other non-standard formats from Explorer in Office. I developed this fix because a customer needs the ability to open WPS and XLR (Works Spreadsheet) files. As soon as the retail disks arrive I’ m going to uninstall Office and put a correct copy on there but for now I came up with this.
I made a new batch file, with the contents:
“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Virtualization Handler\CVH.EXE” “Microsoft Excel 2010 9014006104090000″ %1
Then I saved it as “openwithexcel.bat”, then I told the Open With dialog to always use that batch file to open XLR. Worked no Problem, I then made a second batch file called “openwithword.bat” with the contents:
There must be a better way to associate this icons. The same thing happens (no file association) using the OEM pre-installation kit.
That’s going to be a lot of unhappy customers.
You couldn’t right click on the file with the xlr extension, choose open with, and choose the Microsoft Virtualization layer, and make that the default action?
Re: Tyler… the virtualization program does not even show up as an option for “open with”. Its all some great kludge by Microsoft. I have been searching for days on the internet for a solution. There are lots of people with the problem, but MS seems oblivious to it.
This fix is brilliant, thanks! There is so much rubbish on the web about this problem – this fix actually works without having to faff about reinstalling office.
If you want to use this fix, you don’t necessarily want to use the exact syntax provided above. Copy the target of the Word or Excel shortcut in the start menu on your computer.
PS, great fix, thanks!
Thank You! Worked perfectly! I have a netbook… and this was the only solution i was able to find.
Thank goodness someone has a fix for this (oh – the Word batch file is wrong but you can take the details off the Word shortcut) Now all I have to do is find a way of making the document icon look like a word document, Typical MSoft poorly though out rubbish