Windows – How to change a hyperlink’s default open-with behaviour in Excel

hyperlinkmicrosoft excelwindows 7

Using Office 2010 running on Windows 7, I have a hyperlink in Excel to a JPG on a drive:

=HYPERLINK("\\myserver\dir1\file.jpg", "Link")

The problem: when clicked in Excel, this link ONLY opens in Internet Explorer, and I would like to change it to another application such as Windows Photo Viewer or Irfan.

I have found suggestions to do the following, none of which work:

  1. Change the default open-with application in Explorer (right-click, open-with, etc);
  2. Add a new DWORD key to the registry with ForceShellExecute=1 (apparently does not work with Win7).

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Add a new key to the registry:

  1. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile\CLSID
  2. Right-click on (Default) and select Modify
  3. Enter the value {FFE2A43C-56B9-4bf5-9A79-CC6D4285608A}

This will now change the open-with behaviour in MS Excel 2010 to use the default Windows app. Confirmed to work with Excel 2010 and Windows 7.

Surely there is a more elegant solution, though?

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