OpenWith Enhanced: A Better ‘Open With’ Dialog Box for Windows

OpenWith Enhanced is a small application which replaces the standard Windows 7 ‘Open With…’ dialog box with an enhanced one. The enhanced ‘Open With…’ dialog box suggests additional programs to open a particular file with, as well as options to change file associations and more.

Instead of just presenting a plain list of installed applications that require you to guess or actually know which is the best choice for opening a given file, OpenWith Enhanced extends this list with some of the most popular applications that successfully opens that specific file type. This list is based on a constantly-updated database automatically downloaded off the web.

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The list is color coded which makes it easier to spot and differentiate between applications which are installed and which are not. The applications marked with red are not found on the system.

Double clicking a program from the list, one that is not currently installed on the system but is a popular alternative, offers the user an option to download the same from the program’s website.

When the Open With… list becomes overloaded with unneeded applications, OpenWith Enhanced offers a fast and easy option to clean up the list without searching for their traces in the registry. User-wide entries are differentiated from system-wide entries by small icons that appear against each entry.

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OpenWith Enhanced thus serves two purposes – 1) that allows users to discover alterative applications to open the file with, applications whose existence the users might not be aware of, and 2) find programs to open unknown file types – files the user is not familiar with.

Do keep in the mind that the suggested program might not necessarily be better than the one already set as default, as you can see from the following screen-grab.

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