Here's our Windows 95/98 Tip for.. February 16, 1997
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Multiple Associations Made Easy
A while ago, we talked about using the SendTo folder to allow you to launch an associated file type with a different application. Here's another way. Let's say you want to be able to open .TXT documents in either Notepad or Wordpad. Open Explorer and go to View|Options|File Types again. Find the Text Document type in the Registered File Types window, choose Edit to edit that type, and you'll see that the Actions list includes Open and Print. You'll want a new action so choose New. You'll see the New Action dialog box. Call the action "Open in WordPad", and click the Browse button to choose WordPad as the application that needs to perform the action. From now on whenever you right-click a .TXT file, you'll get this new action on the dropdown menu. We've used this method to re-establish associations that were overwritten by installing other applications. For instance, Word took control of .DOC and .RTF files after it was installed. We still like to have .RTFs associated with WordPad for speed reasons, so we added an "Open in WordPad" action to the Microsoft Word Document (.DOC) association.