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

Hi everyone, I've just found this thread and got a workaround. Per the below article, the installed Office instance needs to be O365ProPlusRetail:

Desktop app option is missing when editing Office files in Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

The instructions in that article say to run the following in PowerShell:

$officeLicenseRoot = New-Object -TypeName PSObject $officeLicenseRoot | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name License -Value $(Get-ItemPropertyValue -Path 'HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration' -Name ProductReleaseIds) Write-Host $officeLicenseRoot

If the response doesn't contain "O365ProPlusRetail" then that's probably the issue as it was in my case, even if you haven't changed anything and the Classic Teams client has and continues to work as expected. Rather than spend the afternoon building a new installation package for the "correct" edition, I updated the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration\

The value "ProductReleaseIds" had its data changed from "O365BusinessRetail" to "O365ProPlusRetail" and I was immediately able to select "Native App" in Teams for Office files, no need to restart anything.

While this may cause issues in the future, it's very simple to change the value back and forth until Microsoft patches this functionality back.

I was able to do it yesterday - today it only has 2 options: open in app, open in teams. Typical Microsoft garbage. I don't know why companies keep using it.

Luka, thanks! Your solution worked perfectly. Now, even without an E3 or E5 license, I can once again set to open in app by default.

For those bashing MS for this, while I certainly agree this is a harsh change, it seems they could have chosen to make it impossible to use Luka's work-around to regain this ability without an E3 or E5 license. But they did not, which suggests they left this option available to us intentionally -- yeah, it's a small one-time hassle, so a benefit to companies with E3 or E5, but the rest of us can regain this capability without too much effort too.

Hi
I have E5 and I can see the option, but I'm informed that the fix is move to Office 365 for Apps and you will be able to see it again, having said that another member of my team has the same licence and software version as me and can't see it, so the a paradox that sits with Microsoft.

I believe its as a result of an update before or around Christmas, as this is when people in my org started noticing the issue.

Sorry no help but its another iron in the fire of Microsoft get ya stuff sorted!!

Update, it could relate to the version of Teams mine is 1.600.1381 and I can see the option

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,