How to open linked PDF with Preview, not Word

[tdi]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel I'm setting up a record of invoices sent and payments received. I send invoices as PDF's, and want to record the customer, invoice #, etc. as well as a hyperlink to the invoice on my local drive, in an Excel spreadsheet.
I'm able to successfully insert a hyperlink to a file in a cell. When I click the hyperlink to open it, however, it uses WORD to open a PDF. When Word finally opens, it tells me it can't read the PDF. (Big surprise!)
How do I tell Excel to open a linked PDF with Preview? I can't find an option for that anywhere. Do I need to hack an XML file somewhere?

Thanks,
-Tim

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel
I'm setting up a record of invoices sent and payments received. I send
invoices as PDF's, and want to record the customer, invoice #, etc. as well as
a hyperlink to the invoice on my local drive, in an Excel spreadsheet.
I'm able to successfully insert a hyperlink to a file in a cell. When I click
the hyperlink to open it, however, it uses WORD to open a PDF. When Word
finally opens, it tells me it can't read the PDF. (Big surprise!)
How do I tell Excel to open a linked PDF with Preview? I can't find an option
for that anywhere. Do I need to hack an XML file somewhere?

Thanks,
-Tim

I don¹t think you need to hack anything. Go to the finder and right click a
the pdf file. Check the open with option to make sure it points to preview
or Adobe reader or something other than WORD. You may have to restart the
machine after you do this to make sure Excel knows about the change.

 

[tdi]

I've looked into this a little further. Other applications know to use Preview to open PDF's. It seems that the problem is limited to a small class of files. The PDF that prompted this post was created as Word. When I try to open it from a document hyperlink in Excel, it uses Word to try to open it and fails. This is a bug.
For other PDF's such as the ones I have produced with LaTeX, Excel uses Preview to open them. If I use Word to print to a PDF file, there is not a problem. The only trouble is with linking to PDF created in Word with Save As...
In summary, Excel can't successfully link to a PDF created in Word with Save As... PDF. Print -> Save as PDF works just fine.

 

[CyberTaz]

I've not had an opportunity to test this, so I'll certainly take your word
for it. If you're reasonably sure of your findings please use Help> Send
Feedback to convey them to Microsoft.

Assuming we're able to confirm one of us will also submit a bug report.
Otherwise we'll reply here with any differences encountered. Thanks for the
info.

 

[XinXin]

Thanks for reporting this issue - we are investigating it.

Thanks,
XinXin Liu
Macintosh Business Unit, Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.