I installed Office 2010 on my Windows 7 machine a while back and so far everything has been running smoothly. Recently, however, an odd issue has started occurring. The Jump List associated with all my Office programs have stopped working. They used to look like this:
Now instead of the list of recent documents at the top, it just has the two bottom options! What happened to my recent documents!? I thought it was a taskbar issue, so I right-clicked on the taskbar, went to Properties and then clicked on the Start Menu.
I made sure the options to display recently opened items in the taskbar and Start Menu were checked. I even unchecked them and then re-checked them just to make sure, but the jump list still didn’t work. I had even followed one of my own posts written on Online Tech Tips to clear the Jump List recent items. That didn’t work on this problem though! However, you should still give it a shot just in case.
So what was left to do? Well, I finally figured out what the issue was. Basically, the file type associations for the Office programs somehow got changed and was causing the problem. So here’s what I had to do to get the jump list working again.
First, go to Start and type in file type associations until you see the option Change the file type associated with a file extension.
Now scroll down to the office file extensions like docx, xlsx, pptx, etc. You should see one of two things. Either it’ll have the current default program set to the correct Office program or it’ll have some other program listed. If it’s the correct program like Word shown below, then you can try changing it to a different program like Notepad and then changing it back to the correct app.
If it’s not Word for docx or xlsx for Excel, then you need to change it to the correct program. For some reason, changing the association either back and forth or to the correct program fixes the issue. Now if you open a few files, check the jump list and see if it’s working properly.
If that did not work for you, there may be other items at play that are causing the issue. Go through each item below to help resolve the problem:
1. If you have any third party tray or taskbar utilities installed, make sure to install them and try again.
2. You can try to repair your version of Office. You can do that by going to Control Panel, Programs, click on Office and then click Change. When the dialog appears, choose Repair.
Still having problems with Word, Excel or another program’s jump list? Post a comment here and I’ll try to help! Enjoy!