Expanding Your Open With Menu
As you learned in Chapter 3, you can usually click (or double-click) any document icon to open that
document in whatever program is associated with that type of document. For example, opening an icon
named My Letter.doc would cause that document, My Letter, to open in the Microsoft Word program (if
you have it), or the smaller WordPad program that comes with Windows XP.
In some cases, however, you may want the flexibility to send a particular type of document to any one of
several programs. Suppose you create your own Web pages for publishing on the Internet’s World Wide
Web. Web page documents generally have the file name extension .htm or .html. When you open such
a file, it appears within your Web browser, usually Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you create your own
Web pages, you might want to see how the page will look in other Web browsers, such as Netscape
Navigator. Or, you might want to open the Web page in a text editor such as Notepad, which enables
you to work directly with the HTML that defines the appearance of the page.
To see which installed programs you can currently use to open a specific document, right-click the icon
for the document you want to open, and point to or click Open With. Your options display on a submenu.
In the example in Figure 4-5, for instance, I right-clicked a file named index.htm and chose Open With.
The submenu lists the programs that can currently be used to open that program: Internet Explorer,
Notepad, and WordPad.
Figure 4-5: The Open With submenu for a document file with an .htm file name extension
Tip File name extensions are usually hidden. To bring them out of hiding, choose Tools
› Folder Options from Explorer’s menu bar. On the View tab, clear the Hide
Extensions for Known File Types check box.
If the program you want to use doesn’t appear on the submenu, you can select the Choose Program
option to view more programs. Doing so opens the Open With dialog box, shown in Figure 4-6, where
you can do the following