Monday Productivity Pointers

- [Garrick] Hi, I'm Garrick Chow and welcome to Monday Productivity Pointers. Windows 10 has built-in apps to handle the most common types of files you work with every day like photos, music, and videos. And you might've noticed that when you double-click certain files, they open in these default built-in apps. For example, if I double-click this image file here, it opens up in the Windows Photos app. But these default apps aren't always the apps you prefer to work with. Now one way around this is to right-click on a file, go to open with, and then choose your preferred apps from here.

But if you're always using the same app for certain types of files, doing this can get pretty tedious pretty quickly. So let's take a look at how to change the default apps in Windows 10. Go to the start menu, and go to settings, then click system, and here select default apps. And that gives us a list of several types of files and the apps that are currently assigned to open them. So you can see the photos are currently set to be opened by the Photos app. And videos are set to be open by the Movies & TV app.

Now some of these may not have any default apps at all yet. But to change one, just click on the current app's name, and that gives you a list of the other apps installed on your computer, and there's even an option here to look for an app in the store. Just select the one you prefer to use. And from that point on, those types of files will open in the selected app. By the way, this is also where you can set the default browser for your system. So if you don't want to use the built-in Microsoft Edge browser when you click web links and other applications, just choose one of your other installed browsers from here.

At the top of this list is where you can choose your default e-mail application. You can choose from an installed e-mail client, or select your web browser if you prefer to use webmail. Now be aware that even if you set default apps this way there's a chance that your selected app won't always be the one that opens depending on the type of file you're trying to work with. For example, there are tons of different file formats for audio files, and Windows might not always recognize certain files as audio files. Or you may prefer that certain types of audio files be opened in one app, and other types of audio files be opened in another.

And the same may apply for photos and videos. In those cases, scroll down and click choose default apps by file type. This gives you a long list of file types with their current default applications. So if I scroll down to say AIFF files, I can see that the current default application here is iTunes. But I can click iTunes and change it to my preferred application for handling these types of files. So now any time I double-click one of those files, it opens up in my preferred application.

But other types of audio files will continue to open in iTunes unless I scroll down that list and find their file types to change their applications. I'm going to press the Windows key and I to go back to settings. And we'll go back to system and default apps. Now if you ever want to set all the file types back to their defaults and start over, just come back to the main default apps screen, and here you can click reset to reset to the Microsoft recommended defaults. Alright, so that does it for this week. I'm Garrick Chow, and we'll see you next time for more Monday Productivity Pointers.