Drag and drop won't open Office Docs

[Belisarius]

I'm using Office 2003 with Win XP. None of the Office
apps will open a document by dragging its icon from Win
Explorer to the respective Office app icon on the desktop
or on the start menu. Non-Office apps open correctly
with their files, and Office documents will open when
double-clicked.

The only time it makes a difference is when I want to
open an html document in FrontPage rather than in IE. I
can always right click, select Open With and then
FrontPage, but a quick drag and drop is simpler.
Appreciate any advice - this is an annoyance, but not a
show-stopper (otherwise Office 2003 is great!)

 

[AA]

I'm using Office 2003 with Win XP. None of the Office

apps will open a document by dragging its icon from Win
Explorer to the respective Office app icon on the desktop
or on the start menu. Non-Office apps open correctly
with their files, and Office documents will open when
double-clicked.

The only time it makes a difference is when I want to
open an html document in FrontPage rather than in IE. I
can always right click, select Open With and then
FrontPage, but a quick drag and drop is simpler.
Appreciate any advice - this is an annoyance, but not a
show-stopper (otherwise Office 2003 is great!)

This really bugged me too. I ended up replacing the icon with a
regular shortcut referencing winword.exe and excel.exe (rightclick and
drag them out of the Office10 folder). You can drop files on these
shortcuts. You can also rename the shortcuts and customize how the
programs open with /switches on the command line. I'm using Office XP,
Word 2002. Hopefully this will work with 2003.

 

[Belisarius]

AA -- Thanks very much. That works for Office 2003 also
and will solve my problem.

 

[Beth Melton]

This is due to how the shortcuts to the Office apps are created.
Right-click the shortcut and select Properties. Notice how the Target
reflects the name of the application rather than the path to the
executable.

All you need to do is create a shortcut to the executable to enable
the drag/drop capibility. For example if you installed Word using the
default installation path the shortcut target should be:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\WINWORD.EXE"

--
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
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