This has me really frustrated. I have been using a very old Office suite (Office 2002) and for my simple needs it has been just fine. I have a few simple spreadsheets with some macros, some doc files…. easy stuff. I decided to bite the bullet and get the Office 2024 stand alone app. Downloaded it, installed it. Brought up my most used spreadsheet and the macro didn’t run. Some security issue. Read up on it, found a solution, put it into play and now that works. Fine.

But…. if I double click on the xls file, it does not open. If I open Excel and then within that, open the file - it opens as it should. But double clicking on the file just gets me a dialog which says what app should open it. It knows the Excel app is there but when I click on it and say “always” or “just once” it just closes and doesn’t open. Word doc files did the same thing. <edit> But once I uninstalled Word and then re-associated the new file, double clicking on “.doc” files now works correctly. But “.xls” files still don’t open. </edit>

I went into Settings-Apps-Default Apps and made sure the association was pointing to the right place.

Still didn’t work. I thought, I probably should have uninstalled the original Office Excel & Word so I did that and restarted. Still double clicking does not open. Still get a dialog box asking me to choose an app which it then ignores.

I looked at the properties of a xls file and it had this:

Notice “type of file”… not right. If I right click on the file and go to “open with” it shows both an Excel with the right icon and below that the old Excel.

Back in Settings-Apps-Default Apps specifically for Excel, I get this:

The .xls association has the old description. I can’t seem to change it.

If I have a bat file with this text:
start “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE” “C:\Users\scare\Documents\XL\Camping.xls”
it opens in the new Excel as it should. But double clicking it: nada. In the Properties, there is a “change” button, but that just opens up the same dialog of

So. I can create a bunch of bat files to point to the xls files, but that seems ridiculous. Can anyone point me to a solution? If I dig through regedit, I can see things like

`[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5]
@=“Microsoft Excel 95 Worksheet”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\CLSID]
@=“{00020810-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\CurVer]
@=“Excel.SheetMacroEnabled.12”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\NotInsertable]
@=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\Protocol]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\Protocol\StdFileEditing]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\Protocol\StdFileEditing\Server]
@=“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE”
`

which has the old “Microsoft Excel 95 Worksheet” in it but it does point to the right program “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE”.

I would appreciate any help/advice you can give me. Thank you.
S.