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.
