How do I add a program to the right-click New menu in Windows 7?

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How do I add a program to the right-click “New” menu in Windows 7?

On my new Windows 7 Pro PC, I installed MS Office 2003 (because I still like it). Now the right-click “New”menu has entries for MS Word and MS Access, but NOT for MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, or MS Publisher. The Office installation process apparently added an entry for the first two programs, but not for the last three, for unknown reasons. Searching on the internet, there appear to be an incredible number of utilities and forums that are try to address the problem, but the solutions that I found seem to have a lot of problems and all involved editing the registry. There is apparently no Microsoft utility or advice even though this seems to be a very common problem. I’m not comfortable editing the Registry and don’t want to damage my new Windows 7 installation. Is there any simple way to add the other three entries in this right-click “New” menu WITHOUT editing the registry (which I have never done)? If not, then what is the simplest way to accomplish this goal? Thanks for any suggestions on a simple foolproof way to solve this problem.

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See if either Your menu or Context menu editor help.

Joe

--Joe

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R.F.

In what context are you trying to use the Right-Click menu. Since the right-click menu is context sensitive we need to know where you are trying to use it. :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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RetiredGeek: It’s the simplest possible situation, I think: on the desktop, I right click on a blank area, then left click on “New”. The resulting list shows 8 items total, including MS Word and MS Access (as I said), but not MS Excel, Publisher, or Powerpoint. The same thing happens if I right click while I’m looking at a folder.

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R.F.

Here’s a How-To-Geek article on Adding Items to the Desktop Shortcut Menu.
Sorry, but it does involve editing the registry but it is very detailed and if you just exercise a bit of caution you should be OK!
You can use a free program like ERUNT to backup the Registry first or just create a restore point before starting. :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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RetiredGeek: Thank you for your suggestion, but the “How-to-Geek” article describes how to add an application to the (first) right-click menu, but I am interested in adding an application to the list of programs under the “New” option of the (first) right-click menu. Is there another tutorial to do that?

JoeP517: Both of the options that you suggested appear to do the same thing as the tutorial above. They seem to add an option to the top-level right-click menu instead of to the list of programs under the “New” tab. I’m specifically interested in adding the three programs mentioned previously to the “New” tab. Are there any instructions in how to do this with either of these programs ? (I admit I am hazy about how these programs actually work.)

Thanks again for any further suggestions. I still find it odd that Microsoft doesn’t provide a utility to do this.

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R.F.

You might try reinstalling Office 2003 as it should do this for you as this screen shot of my Win-7 Office 2003 installation shows.
32526-NewMenu :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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There is not necessarily one good way to insert document types to the New menu; it depends on the type of document.

Windows searches for items in the registry at HKCR.XXX where .XXX is the document extension, such as .bmp for Bitmaps, .xlsx for Excel 2007 Workbooks, .txt for Text Files, etc. For each one of these extensions, there is a ShellNew sub-key.

For documents that do not require predefined parameters, the ShellNew subkey contains a String Value named NullFile with no data. Text Files (.txt) and Bitmaps (.bmp) fall into this catagory.

For document types that do require predefined parameters, there must be a blank document of that type located at the %WINDIR%ShellNew folder. The ShellNew subkey for that type must point to that file. Instead of having a String Value of NullFile with no data, it must contain a String Value of FileName that points to that file by name in the contained data. JPEG Files (.jpeg) and Excel Workbooks (.xlsx) fall into this category.

For example, to create a menu item for an Excel 2007 Workbook, there must be a blank workbook in the %WINDIR%ShellNew folder (e.g. %WINDIR%ShellNewexcel2007.xlsx). Then there must be a registry entry that point to this file:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xlsxShellNew]
“FileName”=”excel2007.xlsx”

Likewise, the conventional way to disable items from the New menu is to rename the sub-key from ShellNew to ShellNew-, or to simply delete the key (with caution, of course).

You used to be able to do this using Microsoft’s TweakUI for legacy versions of Windows, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything similar for later versions.

32524-NewMenu

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J.G.

Thanks for the info! Very Informative. :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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What about just doing a repair to Office? You do have the full office license as well?

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Thanks for all the suggestions.

I tried the Repair Install, but there was no change to the right-click New menu

Then I removed MS Office 2003 entirely. After this, MS Word and MS Access were removed from the “New” menu so that now no Office programs were in the “New” menu at all.

Then I installed MS Office using the typical install option. Immediately after this install, there were still NO Office programs added to the New Menu, so it’s now worse then it was when I started.

But then I restarted the PC, and now MS Word and MS Access are back in the New Menu. So the restart had some effect on the situation.

Finally, I installed the Office 2003 SP3 update and restarted, but that made no change to the New menu.

So I was ready to give up – then I decided to try to understand jgstanley’s note above. I discovered:
C:WindowsShellnew contains the following files:
Access9.mdb, excel9.xls, journal.jnt, mspub.pub, pwrpt11.pot, and winword8.doc.

Then I started regedit.exe and found the following:
There appears to be the following entry in the registry for Excel:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xlsExcel.Sheet.8ShellNew with a value of excel9.xls, which seems to be correct, according the note from jgstanley.
Same thing for Publisher:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.pubPublisher.Document.11ShellNew with a value of mspub.pub,
Same thing for Powerpoint:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.pptPowerPoint.Show.8ShellNew with a value of pwrpt11.pot

So it looks like it ought to work, although none of these registry keys have the actual text that is displayed in the “New” menu so there must be something else that has to be set up. I also noticed that the Office installation on my old XP machine DOES have ALL the office programs in the New menu. In any event, I can still use the Office programs in my new PC by just starting them from a shortcut, so I am ready to give up unless anybody has another idea how to fix the problem. Still, having them in the New menu would be handy. Thanks again for all the suggestions.

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Then I started regedit.exe and found the following:
There appears to be the following entry in the registry for Excel:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xlsExcel.Sheet.8ShellNew with a value of excel9.xls, which seems to be correct, according the note from jgstanley.
Same thing for Publisher:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.pubPublisher.Document.11ShellNew with a value of mspub.pub,
Same thing for Powerpoint:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.pptPowerPoint.Show.8ShellNew with a value of pwrpt11.pot

It may be in the finicky way Windows searches for these entries.

Windows searches for these sub-keys directly under the file type extension. It will search for the new .xls document at:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xlsShellNew
but not at:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xlsExcel.Sheet.8ShellNew

Even if the key you have exists, there needs to be a duplicate key directly under the file type extension. So, for the publisher document, you would need to duplicate the information contained in:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.pubPublisher.Document.11ShellNew
in the registry at:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.pubShellNew

In this way, Windows knows what to use as a new document for a .pub (Publisher Document) or .xls (Excel Spreadsheet). The same would apply to other documents that are defined in the registry.

It’s cumbersome, but that’s just how the Windows Explorer shell is coded…

EDIT
There can be multiple
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xxxSomething.Some.thingShellNew
entries, but Windows Explorer shell only cares about
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xxxShellNew
when building this menu. This is to alleviate problems when installing new software that covers the same file type.
:rolleyes:

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Problem solved !! I am happy to report that my problem is solved and all of the MS Office programs now appear in the “New” menu.

Thanks to some ideas that jgstanley mentioned, I compared the registry entries for the two programs that DID appear in the New menu with the registry entries for the three that did not. I noticed that the registry entries for the programs that did appear had a “key name” (not sure what the correct word is) for the Data field of the (Default) entry. For .doc, for example, this “key name” was Word.Document.8. This same string was then the name of the key that contained the ShellNew entry, and the Shellnew entry contained the name of the blank file in c:WindowsShellNew. But the Data field for the (Default) entry of the three programs that did NOT appear in the “New” menu all had a string similar to “xls_auto_file” for this Data field. So I changed the Data field of the (Default) entry of these three programs to the name of the key containing the Shellnew key. And presto !! the three missing programs appeared in the “New” menu. I did have to shutdown (NOT just restart) and then reboot to make the change occur.
Below are screen shots of the correct entries for .xls, including the Data values of both .xls and ShellNew (if I can figure out how to upload them). .ppt and .pub are similar.
Thanks again – this is the first time I have successfully modified the registry (and I DID make a Restore Point first).
(Well, I can’t figure out how to upload my screen shots, so if anybody wants to see them, please tell me how to do that. )

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In Lounge Postings, to insert an Image from your computer, in the Lounge Quick Reply, the icon is in the top row (where all the editing icons are). It’s in the group of four icons to the left of the block quote (quotation bubble) icon, second icon from the left. This brings up a popup window which allows you to upload an inline image from your computer. In the Advanced Editor, it’s Second Row, second group from the right (to the left of the Block Quote icon), second from the left. A Mouse hover will confirm that you have the correct icon highlighted.

-- rc primak

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I think the pictures finally got uploaded…….

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Thanks. This helps us to see what you’ve accomplished.

-- rc primak

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