

If you’d rather change the default setting for yourself so that a single left-click opens in the desktop app always, there are two places you can change your file opening preference – a file’s open menu or your Teams settings. How to change default file opening behavior of Teams to always open in desktop app Or if you already have the file opened in Teams, just click Open in Desktop App at the top. So if you need to open a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file outside Teams, using its full desktop app: This is great for those one-off files that require the full desktop application. If you right-click a file in Teams and hover over Open, you’ll see you can choose to open that one file using the default or your preferred experience (Teams, app/desktop, or browser). How to open a file from Teams in the desktop/client app without changing default settings In this post, I’ll cover how to open a file in a different context (Teams, desktop app, or browser) for one-time needs as well as changing your default setting to force all files to open in the desktop version if you wish. We can choose where to open a file before we even open it.


Here are the three Teams file experience options you have: If you don’t make any changes to your default settings in Teams, documents will open in Teams automatically. If you’re still not seeing it, make sure you have updated to the latest version of Teams. Note: You must use the desktop version of Teams to enable this feature (doesn’t apply to web version). However, when dealing with complex files you may wish to change how files are opened to be able to utilize the full functionality of the desktop app instead. You can open files directly within Teams to have a single context in which you’re able to do your work.
