Have ALL files of a certain type open with a particular program every time. That’ll make “Open With” switch to “Always Open With,” and then you can choose your program as before.Īnd if you’re more of the “use a menu”–type person, you should know that these first two choices are available from the File menu within Finder once you’ve selected your item, as well (and the Option key will work the same way to invoke “Always Open With”).ģ. To do this, you’ll follow the same steps as above, but when you have the “Open With” option showing, hold down the Option key on your keyboard. This’ll make, say, a specific PDF open in Adobe Reader rather than Preview forever, but it won’t affect other PDFs. Have one file open with a particular program every time.

This won’t change what program the file will open with the next time, though, so it’s perfect if you just need a temporary solution.Ģ. Then select the application you’d like to use as I’ve done above, and your file will unsurprisingly open with that. To accomplish this, right- or Control-click on the file and hover your cursor over “Open With” from the contextual menu. This would be useful if you couldn’t get Microsoft Word to open a document and you just wanted to read its contents in Pages. Have one file open with a particular program only one time. But what if you want to change this behavior? Well, if that’s what you’re looking for, there are three ways you could go about it:ġ. When you open an image file, for example, Preview will likely launch to accommodate it double-clicking on a document may open Pages or Word and opening a PDF might just mean that you’ve got Adobe Reader all up in your face. Behind the scenes, your Mac keeps a database of which programs are configured to open which types of files.

Mac set default program for extension