Mac Change Default App For Extension

Follow these steps to change your default preferences: Find a file with an extension you want to change the defaults to. Right click on the file to see a menu, and select “Get Info”. If you click on a file and the wrong app opens it, you can change the default application to open that file or file type. These are the steps to both change the default app to open one specific file or to change the default app to open all files of one file type.

A: (Click here for Windows instructions.)

Mac OS X makes it easy to change file associations, which determine what programs are used to open various file types. You can change the setting for individual files or for all files of a specific file type.

Individual Files

Mac Change Default App For Extension

To change what program opens a specific file, you first need to open the file's information window. This can be done by selecting the file and clicking 'Get Info' from the File menu. Or you can simply right-click (Control-click for single button mouse users) on the file and select 'Get Info' from the contextual menu that pops up. The information window should look something like image below:

Notice the section in the middle of the window that says 'Open with.' When you click the drop-down menu, it will show you a list of applications that can open the selected file type. If the file is a Microsoft Word document, the list of programs may look something like this:

Select the program that you would like to open the file and close the information window. When you double-click the document, it will open using the program you selected.

All Files

App

You can also change what program opens all documents of a certain file type. For example, you may want all Microsoft Word documents to open in AppleWorks. To do this, first select AppleWorks 6 in the drop-down menu, as in the example above. Then, before closing the window, click the button. You will be prompted to confirm the change with an alert window:

Click and all files with a .DOC extension will now open in AppleWorks. Of course, you can change the file associations back to Microsoft Word by selecting Word from the drop-down menu and repeating the same steps.

Updated: June 14, 2011

Each document that you have on your Mac is associated with a default application which macOS uses to open the file whenever you double-click on its icon in Finder.
Sometimes you may have a legitimate reason for changing which app your Mac automatically launches when you open a common file type – when a newly installed app assumes control of it, or when you want to open AVI video files in VLC instead of QuickTime, for instance. The following steps show you how to do just that.
  1. In a Finder window, right-click (or Ctrl-click) the file whose default launch app you want to change.
  2. From the contextual menu, select Open With -> Other....
  3. A new navigation window will appear for you to select an alternative app to open the selected file. In our example, we're selecting the VLC media player app.
  4. Tick the checkbox next to Always Open With to ensure your selection applies in future to all files with the same extension (AVI files, in our case). If you don't see the checkbox, click the Options button at the lower left of the window and it should appear.
  5. Click Open.
If the app that you want to use to open the file type is greyed out, it's because macOS doesn't think there's a valid association between the two. In most cases this is correct, but you can still override it by changing the Recommended Applications view to All Applications using the Enable: dropdown menu.

Mac Change Default App For Extension Free


There's another way you can change a file type's associated app in macOS: Right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the file in a Finder window and select Get Info.
In the information dialog that appears, you should see the Mac change default app for extension freeOpen with: section immediately below the Comments: section (click the chevron buttons to expand individual sections). Select Other... in the drop-down menu of apps to select one not already in the list, and then click Change All...

Change Default Open Apps

to apply the association to all files with the same extension.

Mac Change Default App For Extension Download


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