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 FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedVirtualization HandlerCVH.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 FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedVirtualization HandlerCVH.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:
