Built in Open With not always working with MS Office programs

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

By that token Microsoft would never be able to change anything anywhere since any software could use any function of any part of the OS.

That's true - IBM still has utilities available under z/OS that first saw the light of day in OS/360 50 years ago, most long lived operating systems have boatloads of legacy.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

These registry keys are created under the Software\Microsoft\Windows Explorer and are thus explicitly for use by Windows Explorer

They're put there by msiexec.exe when Office 2007 is installed. If Office 2007 is installed Windows Explorer provides the user with Open, Edit, New and Print verbs for Word and Excel documents - its the DDE facilities in WINWORD.EXE and EXCEL.EXE that delivers the functionality.

I'm not sure what this means "are thus explicitly for use by Windows Explorer".

If it implies exclusively then ... Some of the Windows Explorer replacements would also use them.

Deprecated can mean obsolete, i.e not to be used in future products, in this instance MS is using that definition - rather than what they did when they deprecated Column Handlers in Windows Explorer -- whooshka gone in Vista, never been seen since.

In respect of this topic Word and Excel haven't changed much since they were bundled into Office 25 years ago. I predict they will retain their DDE capabilities as long as they are a current MS products. And if that's true then Windows (File) Explorer will support DDE parameters in order to present the options to end users. I occasionally use the Print and New options - at one time I used them much more.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

That's true - IBM still has utilities available under z/OS that first saw the light of day in OS/360 50 years ago, most long lived operating systems have boatloads of legacy.

And yet, Microsoft is perfectly comfortable removing deprecated legacy features, as you yourself go on to point out.

In respect of this topic Word and Excel haven't changed much since they were bundled into Office 25 years ago. I predict they will retain their DDE capabilities as long as they are a current MS products. And if that's true then Windows (File) Explorer will support DDE parameters in order to present the options to end users. I occasionally use the Print and New options - at one time I used them much more.

Unfortunately for that theory, Word 2007 actually does not support the DDE command any more. Sending it the DDE Command "REM_DDE_Direct" results in a command not found error. So Microsoft have, as a matter of fact dropped the DDE support, they apparently just forgot to remove it from the registry keys.