PDFs opening in the wrong app? Change your default apps once and for all

Double-click a PDF — and Edge opens, even though you read PDFs in a different program. Double-click a photo — and some app you never chose pops up. Plenty of people spend years working around this: right-click, Open with, pick from the list… for every single file. Yet this is a setting you change once — and from then on, every file type opens exactly where you want it to.

How to do it

1. The fastest route is through the file itself: right-click it, choose Open with → Choose another app, pick the right one, and confirm that it should be used always for this file type.
2. To handle it in bulk, go to Settings → Apps → Default apps: pick an app (say, your PDF reader or browser) and assign it the file types it should handle.
3. It also works from the other direction — on the same Settings page's search box you can type an extension (say .pdf) and assign it an app directly.
4. Don't forget your default browser: if you want links from mail and documents to open in a different browser, you set that on the same page with one button.
5. After major system updates or installing new programs, some assignments occasionally get “reset” — when files start opening somewhere else, come back here and fix it in two clicks.

A typical scenario

A teacher opens dozens of PDFs a day: tests, guides, scanned assignments. Every one, though, opens in a browser that can't properly annotate, so he manually reopens each file in his reader — ten extra seconds, thirty times a day. One trip to Default apps and a double-click does exactly what it should from then on.

The same relief awaits anyone whose Outlook links stubbornly open in the “wrong” browser with no accounts signed in — after changing the default browser, the world falls back into order.

What you get out of it

• No more daily workaround: double-click goes back to meaning “open this where I work,” not “open this somewhere and I'll move it over.”
• Seconds that add up: ten seconds times dozens of files a day is minutes — and above all, that small, repeated irritation disappears.
• Predictability: files and links behave the same way everywhere in the system, including email attachments.

Pro tip

Before hunting for a PDF reader, you might already have one: office suites, browsers, and plenty of apps can read PDFs — but only some can comfortably add annotations and sign. Pick the one app that handles everything you do with PDFs, and set that as your default — bouncing between three readers is worse than any one of them alone.