Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Secrets of the Office Masters: Details, Details

In common dialog boxes, trying to use information in the Type column is an exercise in frustration, thanks to Microsoft's marketing machine. After a default installation of Office XP, you'll have 75 registered file types, each starting with the word Microsoft—Microsoft Word Document, Microsoft Excel Worksheet, and even Microsoft HTML Document 5.0. The effect is to make it impossible to distinguish the types of documents in a detailed list unless you expand the Type column to a ridiculous width.

Making all file extensions visible is a crude solution to this problem, but Explorer windows don't allow you to sort by this information anyway.

So here's a better idea: Regain control of the file types that ...