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With Excel 2007 I was able to use Open With to associate TSV files with Excel, so that I could double-click on them and they would automatically open with each value in a different cell. But since upgrading to Excel 2010, I can't select Excel as the program to use to open TSV files. If I use Open With and browse to the Excel.EXE and click Open, Excel still isn't in the list of programs to choose. If I select Excelcnv.EXE, then Excel shows up in the list, but I still can't open the file by double-clicking.

The best I've been able to do so far is open Excel first, then use it to open the TSV file, and then I have to do Text to Columns to break up the values. But I really want to have Excel launch just by double-clicking the file.

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Can you rename it to a .CSV? – techie007 Dec 14 '11 at 14:43
@techie I could, but that's a pain to do on a regular basis, and it also doesn't format it correctly on opening (since it is delimited by tab, not commas). – bwarner Dec 14 '11 at 14:54
I was hoping a) it would be easy to rename them (low amount of them) and b) that it would auto-convert. Guess not on both accounts. :) – techie007 Dec 14 '11 at 15:01
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2 Answers

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In Windows Explorer choose, Tools | Folder options. Next, select the File Types tab. Click the New button. Enter 'TSV' in the File Extension box, then OK. Next, click the Change... button, select the 'Select the program from a list' radio button, then click OK. When the dialog options, scroll to find Microsoft Excel, select it, then click OK. Finally, close the Folder Options dialog.

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I'm using Windows 7, so no File Types tab. The equivalent is "Set Associations" under Control Panel, but eventually it ends up at the same Open With dialog where it doesn't let me choose Excel.EXE. I noticed that *.TSV isn't listed as an Excel file type in Excel's Save As dialog, so it doesn't seem to think it can handle that file type anymore. – bwarner Dec 14 '11 at 15:01
You could use 'Tab Delimited Text', which uses the .TXT extension by default, then alter the extension to be .TSV. – Craig Dec 14 '11 at 16:47
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up vote 1 down vote accepted

Found the problem while digging around in my registry. HKCR\Applications\EXCEL.EXE\shell\open\command was still pointing at the location of Excel 2007. Apparently the upgrade didn't update this? Changing this to point at the location of Excel 2010 made it so that Excel would show up in the Open With dialog after I browsed to the EXE, so I could associate the file type and now it correctly opens and auto-formats!

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