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
    2023-11-09T15:06:24+00:00

    I totally agree with your thoughts. We have resorted to doing this for all users. The unfortunate thing is that most of our users are casual editors. Our content in some of our word files is complex enough that Word via the web or Teams doesn't work well. Microsoft has the option to open with the app, but many users just click on the file to open it up and then it is displayed on the web or teams depending on the default. This then causes all sorts of display issues and calls to the help desk. Unfortunately, we now have told people not to use Teams to look at files, but to sync files to the desktop and look at them via file explorer. While this works fine, it is totally against the direction that Microsoft seems to be going is to work on all files through Teams and or the web. Maybe this is really an issue with not having all the same features within the web versions of the office applications that the desktop versions have. Regardless, a very simple interim solution would be to add one more item on the default choice list to include Open With App. This would be consistent with the other open options. When the web versions of office catch up, then they can take the option away and we don't need the complexity of syncing all of the time for all users.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-11-10T14:39:47+00:00

    This is a bit of a killer. I'm trying to promote the use of Teams for our projects but, like others here, we've found the online apps pretty useless for editing documents of any complexity, so everyone prefers routes that open documents in the native apps. Existing Sharepoint folders are already synced to desktops for this reason. Now I want colleagues to move over to a new set of Sharepoint folders linked to Teams, and they're going to have to sync a new set of folders before getting involved in a project? Easier not to bother with the switch to Teams for our scale of operation, I fear.

    I don't really see our changing our licence model just to solve this.

    Edit: Really, to make Teams/Sharepoint properly usable, we have to consider that the point is to link to files and so on from all over the place. So, if my preference/requirement is to open files in the desktop app, I need that to happen irrespective of whether I am opening them from Sharepoint, Teams, or a link in a message somewhere.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-12-02T13:59:29+00:00

    I have exactly the same issue.

    Using Teams version: 23285.3607.2525.937

    Any fixes on this?

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-03-06T12:29:12+00:00

    Ss basicly it is something Microsoft decided to take out of most licenses and only include it in the enterprise apps, so you wont get it with business premium or business standard.

    in my opionion a ridiculous decision.

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