Windows 7 Customizing a drop down menu.

[Neal Carron]

My OS is 32bit Win7 Pro.
In Windows Explorer, when you right click a file, a drop down menu opens showing options to choose.
I'd like to add another option on that menu.
How do you do that?
(It was easy in WinXP.)

Please let me know if this request is more appropriate in another forum.

Thanks.

 

[Elmer]

Depends what you want to add to the context menu. I collect registry files as that's the way I prefer to do things.
But yiou really need to let folks know what it is you want to add.

 

[Neal Carron]

I want to add another word processor to open a file.

 

[Elmer]

Hmmm. I have an XP reg file to add a Context Menu entry "open in Office Word" to rtf, txt files.
Even with updating to point directly at Winword.exe on my Seven set up it doesn't work. It opens Word but doesn't open the file.
Strange.

 

[Neal Carron]

It looks like it just can't be done in Win7.
More than strange. Very frustrating. I had it all working nicely in XP.
Anyone have any other ideas?

 

[MikeHawthorne]

What happens if you chose "Open With", "Chose Default Program" and then Browse, will it let you add another program to the list.

I see that my open with contains both Word, and Open Office as well as Adobe Indesign, and Word Pad.

Ok, I checked!

Well I'll answer my own question, I opened Browse and selected TextAloud as the default program to open text documents, it added it to the list of programs that will open the files when I click on the "Open with" drop-down message.

But like Elmer, now when I click on it, it opens TextAloud but not the file.

And I thought this would be easy. All the other programs except Indesign which can't open .doc files anyway open the document when selected including Open Office. I have no idea why Indesign is even on the list.

The only thing I can suggest is that these programs all got added to the menu during installation and you might give reinstalling the program again a try, taking special note to see if there is anyplace during the indallation where it asks you what kind of files you want it to open.

Mike

 

[Elmer]

How about adding a shortcut to the "SendTo" folder?

(Default Path) C:\Users\Your User Name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Works well, but sadly not with everything (i.e. opens an empty program window, as above).

 

[Elmer]

I stumbled across Link Removed - Invalid URL and thought straight away about this thread.

I haven't tried it but I'm about to!