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How To Open Documents With Windows Applications On Mac OS (Using VMWare Fusion)

July 26, 2010

I love VMWare Fusion, because it allows me to run Windows applications on my Mac seamlessly. It gets to the point that I want some forms of documents to always open with Windows applications. For instance, I don’t like Mac Office, and would rather use Windows Office to open my Office documents. The problem was that when you go to “Get Info” in Finder, some of the Office applications wouldn’t be listed.

vmware fusion for mac

I solved this by searching for where the applications were located, and found them in this path:

~/Documents/Virtual Machines/

Select the machine that you want (it’ll look like .vmwarevm), and then right-click on it, and choose “Show Package Contents”. When you’re inside, go to the Applications folder, and you’ll see all your applications there.

Now that you know where the applications are, you can either create a link and place them where you want (e.g. in your ~/Applications/ folder), or whenever you do a “Get Info” on a document, you can choose to open all files in the future with those applications (by browsing to that location, and selecting the appropriate application).

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