asked on 4/17/2018

Office 2016 seems to frequently lose its file association to Word, Excel, etc

Our environment consists of 64bit Windows 10 machines running the Fall Creators update using Office 365 (Office 2016). We are also using the OneDrive For Business and and our users sync SharePoint Online document libraries.

Several users are repeatedly losing file associations in Excel 2016 and Word 2016. Clicking an Excel file will tell the user it has no program to open the file in, etc.

We have found the running the Control Panel 'Quick Repair' corrects the file association. Sometimes just opening the main program (i.e. Excel 2016, Word 2016) and then closing it again also will resolve the issue.

Sometimes it happens to the same user several times over the course of a few weeks. We have 250+ users. We have probably seen about 15-20 reports of this happening.

While the problem can be fixed, it is a bit of an annoyance to those users where it has happened more than once.

Has anyone else heard of this issue with Office 2016 randomly losing its file association? Any advice?

Thank you!

Windows 10 Microsoft Office Microsoft 365 Windows OS

Last Comment

Walter Curtis

5/7/2018

Walter Curtis

4/17/2018

Make sure the users are always using a MS browser and not Chrome and/or Firefox.

McKnife

4/17/2018

Your 15-20 reports need to be summed up. The details you give are rather confusing - you need problems that you can reproduce so that we can compare to our results and settings. I have a feeling this won't be possible with the current detail level.

We use sharepoint 2016 and Office 2016 on win10 v1703 and 1709 and office file associations are never lost.

snyperj

4/17/2018

ASKER

I'm sorry, what details are 'rather confusing'?

Walter Curtis

4/17/2018

You mention:

Clicking an Excel file will tell the user it has no program to open the file in, etc.

This is commonly caused when the user is using Chrome. That might be a good first place to check.

Good luck...

snyperj

4/17/2018

ASKER

Just to clarify, this is occurring in the desktop versions of the apps (Excel 2016, Word 2016, etc) not the online versions. The file associations of the desktop apps can be impacted by Google Chrome?

If so, what is it that I would do to alleviate it? I do know that many of our users do prefer to use Chrome, so I could see where it could be part of the problem... I am just trying to understand how it is a part of the problem and what I would need to tell them to do?

Thanks!

SOLUTION

Walter Curtis

4/17/2018