Edit Ofice files from Windows, on the Mac

J

Jason Anderson

Bit poster
Hi - we have a user who is using Parallels Desktop (4) for Mac, and has Outlook running under Windows, with MacOffice under Mac. Is it possible to set up any config so that the user can edit/open Office files from email (on Windows) and edit them on the Mac? Or does the user have to first save the documents out to the Windows desktop, then copy them to the Mac desktop and then edit the files there?
 
With the VM running, go to the Parallels Desktop, Applications menu, Smart Select Edit menu item. Select the Windows application that you want to change the settings for (for example, Microsoft Office Word). You should then be presented with a list of various file extensions and radio button selection options for using either the Mac or Windows app to open those files. Select away. Repeat for any other app.

If you do not have any apps listed in the Smart Select Edit menu item, you may need to run the Populate commands higher on the menu (one for Mac apps, one for Windows apps), then try again.

This has been a bit of a flaky feature for me, but I finally have it working the way I want for the most part. One other thing I needed to do to get things working correctly is to open either (or both, I'm not sure which did the trick) the Mac app and Windows equivalent with the VM running then do the Populate thing. Prior to doing that, the list of extensions was missing many that seemed like they should be obvious (templates in particular).
 
Steven,

Thanks for the tips. For some reason this works. Particularly with Excel, I noticed my SmartSelect feature didn't even have the xls format listed. I am not 100% sure, but I don't believe until I had both opened and I had actually navigated to and opened an xls file with Excel (on the VM) that I had the option in SmartSelect. Once that worked, I had access to the format.

Perhaps part of the issue, at least with the newer Office, is getting these legacy formats (doc, as opposed to the new docx) formally exposed to the programs.

But once both were opened and I opened the file format with the desired program. It seemed that SmartSelect did it's job and Populate probably helped to. I can imagine this being a, "Start working through all of these steps" process on every format that gives me trouble.

Thanks again Steven.
 
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