Restoring Office Document Associations after Sequoia Upgrade

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Originally published at: Restoring Office Document Associations after Sequoia Upgrade - TidBITS

Thanks to user Ed68 on TidBITS Talk for reporting the solution to a problem that cropped up after he upgraded his M1 MacBook Pro to macOS 15 Sequoia. He had also updated to the latest version of Office for Mac (presumably “Microsoft Office for Mac 16.89,” 14 September 2024) the same day, and something about the two updates blocked opening Office documents.

Whenever he tried to open Word or Excel documents, the Finder attempted to open them in other apps, like Preview. When he tried to force the Finder to open a Word document with Word itself, he would get a message saying, “Apple could not verify ‘filename.docx’ is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.” Opening other file types worked fine.

Ed68 had seen other reports of this problem on the Apple Support Community forums, and a few hours after his initial post, he returned with the fix, which is to reassociate .docx and .xlsx files with Word and Excel, respectively. To do this:

  1. Select any .docx file in the Finder.
  2. Choose File > Get Info.
  3. In the Info window’s Open With section, choose Microsoft Word.
  4. Click the Change All button.
Get Info window Open With pane

If necessary, repeat those steps for .xlsx files and Microsoft Excel. I haven’t seen complaints about .pptx files and PowerPoint, but a reassociation is worth trying if you can’t open your presentations. I presume something about the LaunchServices database had become corrupted during the updates.

While this inability to open Word and Excel documents is far from universal after upgrading to Sequoia, enough people chimed in on the Apple Support Community thread to indicate that we’re not talking about a one-off issue. It’s impossible to know if the problem lies with Sequoia or Microsoft 365, but if you encounter it, the fix is easy.

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I had an issue getting PowerPoint to print the slides with notes. It would crash when I would click on print. I solved the problem by logging into Microsoft in a browser. When I tried printing in PowerPoint, it did work.

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Thank you, I had the same problem and fixed it the same way. However, even after this fix, QuickLook (in the Finder) doesn’t work for Word or Excel files (they work for PowerPoint files). Does anyone know of a fix?

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Thank you for the tip. One issue I remember from OSX days is that the “Change all” selection might only apply to the current folder and folders beneath the one containing the selected docx file. It is best to copy the file to the top (home?) folder before setting Word as the default.

BTW this might be caused by a recent Office update as I had a similar experience with Sonoma.

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I’m unfamiliar with that claim, but it doesn’t seem to be true now. I used Change All on a document in a sub-folder and confirmed that the change applied to documents at a higher level in the hierarchy, too.

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Given that this is believed to be a LaunchServices database problem, it might be worth rebuilding the LaunchServices database entirely. The Onyx utility can do it, and I also found (but haven’t tried) this old article from Howard Oakley.

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Thanks for this idea. I downloaded OnyX and rebuilt the LaunchServices database. Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem with QuickLook not working for Word and Excel files. Interestingly, it doesn’t work for docx and xlsx files, but does work for doc and xls files (rebuilding the LaunchServices database didn’t change this behavior. It was like this after installing Sequoia).

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Not that this will help you, but QuickLook does show my older xls and doc files on my MBA running Sequoia. (Just to confirm that this is not universal for people running Sequoia.)

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Enter qlmanage -r in Terminal to reset the Quick Look cache. It might only work with sudo.

If that doesn’t fix it, enter qlmanage -m | grep microsoft

On my Ventura system with Microsoft Office 365, the above command results in:

  com.microsoft.word.doc -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.powerpoint.pot -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.word.dot -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.excel.xlt -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.word.stationery -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.powerpoint.pps -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.excel.xls -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)
  com.microsoft.powerpoint.ppt -> /System/Library/QuickLook/Office.qlgenerator (46)

Notice that there’s no specific “type” for .xlsx or .docx, and that it doesn’t use a Microsoft quick look generator. The generator is part of macOS.

That’s what allows you to preview Office files without having Office installed. But it also is why the Quick Look previews of Office files don’t always work. I too have seen cases where it will preview a .doc file, but not when the file is saved to .docx.

(that’s not to say it won’t preview any .docx files, just that the support is flakey)

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For me this seems to be an intermittent problem with JPG files. I prefer to open them with Graphic Converter but sometimes they automatically open with Preview. I found, many years ago, that I had to place a JPG file in the root directory and then go through the Open With, Always Open With sequence to fix this (I think OSX prompted with “Apply to sub-folders” or similar)

It happened the other day when I went to open a JPG file on an external drive so I don’t know if my “tip” is useful for current macOS - but there is no harm in trying it.

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Are you thinking of changing permissions? That is what this sounds like to me. The Always Open With doesn’t interact with the filesystem/directory structure in any way – it is updating the LaunchServices database which associates file types with application signatures.

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You are probably correct about my confusion with Permissions. But I do remember having to put a JPG file in the root directory to get Graphic Converter as the default across all folders. Might have been the Snow Leopard days.

I should try booting up my 2004 iMac to see if I am imagining things :frowning:(might be time to boot it up anyway to see if the hard disk still spins).

My mistake…
It booted up! Managed to open this Tidbits page in a very old version of Firefox. Tried the Open With command on an old GIF file and it worked the same as Sonoma, with Change All the only option.
gif-example

The file was created in 2005 and was used in that great app iChat!

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As a follow-up for anyone who experienced the same problem: somehow it fixed itself this past week. Maybe there was some maintenance routine that rebuilds the databases running overnight, but as of now, QuickView is working again for all MS Office formats.

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