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

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.

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.

Same here... for now I still recommend my users to sync their most used Teams libraries to the file explorer. I support a lot of customers on their way from classic file shares to M365. My experience is that the change for the users is rather hard. Yes, changes are always hard... But not everything has to be hard. My goal is to organise it as smooth as possible. Tiny improvements like to default desktop-apps to open office files in Teams would definetly help to cope with the change better. Many people are used to work in their desktop-apps and in file epxlorer eversince. With Teams they're now entering the world of web-based apps. This will be the future, no doubt. But we're still in transition and unless the web-based versions cover the productivity of a user with the desktop-apps people will prefer the desktop version. And it doesn't matter if they work for an SMB or an Enterprise company. Therefore I don't understand the decision of Microsoft to remove the default-option for desktop-apps in Teams from Business Licences at this time. 1) This option is so basic that it should be included in every licence that also includes dekstop-apps 2) It helps with the transition to Teams/M365 and increases usability

Thanks for letting me know, I appreciate that.

With that said, Thanks for reaching out to the MS community.

Kind Regards

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,