Changing Word Icon

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Hi,

In our company filing structure I want to change the icons of certain Word files to a different one. Is this possible? How?

Thanks,

m.q.

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If you are referring to icons on your desktop, you can (Win95) right-click on the icon, choose Properties, Shortcut, Change Icon and type a new file name such as MORICONS.DLL.

Otherwise, when you say “icons” to where are you referring?

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I am not referring to a shortcut. I’m referring to the Word files themselves. I have certain Word file that act as directory indexes & I want to give them a special icon to make them stand out from other Word files.
http://www.iconbazaar.com has mant icons I can download as GIFs – but how do I get NT4 (not Win9x) to use them?!

Thanks,

m.q.

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You’re not using a Mac you know.

If you really want to do this… I would do the following – Caveat (I have never done this but it appears pretty easy in theory)

Change document extension from .doc to something not used (I personally would choose .dix for document index but that’s just me).

Now in Windows Explorer go to View|Options and create a new document type and make sure it has all the same options as a Word document but change the icon and change the extension to match yours. This is probably easier to do by hacking the registry to duplicate the doc key and name it the dix key. This is going to be heaps easier as you should then export the registry key and run it on each machine that needs to see the icon and file type differently.

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Hi KT,

Just guessing here, but if the other user didn’t have the necessary Registry entry, then their Windows installation probably wouldn’t recognize the .dix file type.

Gary

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They would probably get the dialog box listing all the applications asking which one should handle this. If you warn them in advance and they pick Microsoft Word, it should behave just fine. Once Word gets its hands on your document, it will know how to handle it by the internal file structure. It’s just that Windows doesn’t know anything about files except what is contained in the registry about the extension and (hopefully) where it is and how much room it is taking on the disk.

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Hi KT:

I’ll shoot in an answer before Andrew wakes up. Whoops, I should be asleep instead. Oh well. The answer is that you wouldn’t be able to open it by double clicking, because that only works with a default extension on your machine. But because it’s actually a Word document, you could open it either from within Word’s open dialog box or by Shift+right click & choosing Open with… In fact, you could then choose to associate the extension with Word.

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Hi again,

See Beyond .doc an article on the vbadeveloper site about creating and using additional file extensions from Word. It’s apparent that I’m spending way too much time surfing these days.

Hope this helps,

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