Repair File Associations in Windows XP

So, you know PowerPoint is installed on your computer, but when you double click a PowerPoint file… surprise! It either refuses to open in PowerPoint or pops open in some totally different program.

Don’t panic — this usually means your computer has mixed up which program should open your PowerPoint files. Before we fix that mix up (called a file association), let’s take a quick detour and talk about something important: file extensions.

PowerPoint's File Extensions

There are many different file types on our systems, and each individual file type is set to open in a particular application. The file types can be usually identified with their file extensions.

When you double-click any file, here's what Windows XP does:

• It identifies the file type using the file extension of the file.
• It then activates the associated application to open the clicked file.

Most of the time, this works great unless your file association gets changed, or in some cases, there may be no file associations in place.

About File Associations

As you are probably aware now, each file type is associated with a particular application on your computer. These associations can sometimes change.

So, how do these file associations get changed? This typically happens when there is more than one program on your computer for opening a particular file type or when you install a new software program that insists on changing the file associations. In PowerPoint, this could mean that you double-click a PPT or PPS file, and PowerPoint does not launch at all.

Fortunately, it is easy to repair these associations. Follow these steps to set the file associations right:

1. Right-click on the file whose file association has gone wrong. Doing so will open a context menu, as shown in Figure 1, below.
2. 
   Figure 1: Context menu
2. From the menu, choose the Open With | Choose Program option, as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Choose the program to associate
3. Doing so opens the Open With dialog box, as shown in Figure 3, below. Select the program you want Windows to use to open files of this type and select it. If you find that the program you want (PowerPoint) is not in the list, click the Browse button, navigate to the powerpnt.exe executable on your computer, and select it.
4. Put a checkmark next to Always use the selected program to open this kind of file. When done, click the OK button.
5. 
   Figure 3: Choose the program you want to open PowerPoint files with
3. The next time when you will double-click the PowerPoint file, you'll find it will open in PowerPoint itself.