Windows/Office (Any Version)

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Can anyone explain to me the details of how Windows knows HOW to find any specific Office program when you choose START – RUN – and type something like Excel — it finds and knows to open Excel.exe. I don’t find anything in the registry that shows Windows how to do this, and would like the know the secret of how it locates the file to open.

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Somewhere in the Registry file is a path statement that tells the system to look in the folder that contains the Excel.exe file. The Registry has paths to almost every folder, so the system can find a file. In the old days, when you and I had to enter the path statement into the Config.sys file, if you didn’t enter a path to the folder containing Excel.exe, Excel wouldn’t start. The system looks into each folder listed in the path statement(s) unitl it finds the executable file it is looking for. The earlier the path is in the path statement(s), the sooner the application will start.

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Applications are registered when they’re installed, and each has a key in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTApplications hive. The path to the executable lives in a key buried further down under the specific application key. It gets a bit trickier when you have multiple versions installed

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