Microsoft Teams - "Open with the desktop app" default setting has disappeared

Anonymous
2021-11-05T14:00:48+00:00

Hi,

We are currently using Microsoft Teams for team collaboration and we mainly use Microsoft Office desktop applications to open and edit our Office files. We do not use the integrated Teams editors or the web-based editors.

A couple weeks ago, the "Default behavior" option appeared in our Teams desktop applications and we were able to select "Desktop app" as the default way of opening files when double clicking a file in Teams. This is very handy for us and we recommended to all of our users to switch to this in order to open files.

But a few days ago, we discovered that this option is not available anymore in the choices presented : We now only have the "Teams" and "Browser" options, either from the general "Settings" menu or while right-clicking a file and select "Change default". The desktop app option has completely disappeared from the list. For those like me who configured Teams to open files directly from Office by default, the new default is now the Teams editor.

We tried to delete Microsoft Team's cache on one of our computers, but the option is still missing.

Is there a way to have this option back for our organization ? Is there something we need to configure in the Teams' admin center ?

Regards,

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for business | Files | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-09-30T09:13:27+00:00

    Its really annoying. Think the logic is to try and push everyone onto virtual 0365 which is function prohibitive as it has so few of the features of the desktop apps.

    To note though its also license related which is even more stupid. Certain enterprise licenses still have this functionality but the lower tier licenses dont even though you are paying for the same service.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-09-30T08:21:35+00:00

    Yes, but what options are you offered as defaults? I can choose to open an individual file in the desktop app, but I can only set the default as browser or Teams, neither of which is especially useful.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-09-30T03:17:59+00:00

    Not sure which version I'm currently on, but I'm able to change the default app for an attachment in Teams chat.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-09-30T01:51:52+00:00

    As Luka mentioned, the key is this:

    1. Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration
    2. Look on the right for "ProductReleaseIds"
    3. Change to "O365ProPlusRetail", which was O365BusinessRetail

    Worked for us, thanks!

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-09-04T15:25:31+00:00

    Further to my previous reply, I've just sent a document for review and been asked to move a paragraph above the table to which it referred, as well as to sort out the completely messed up paragraph numbering. The reviewer had been using the online application. I of course had been using the desktop version. When I asked the reviewer to switch to the desktop one, both problems went away.

    It's this kind of thing that makes us unwilling to go near the online versions - we just can't trust them to show what's in the document and, if we try to use them to make changes, we may never get usable documents back.

    Pushing us into the online versions in these circumstances does not seem very reasonable.

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