Good day.
It seems like there is still no solution to add LibreOffice apps to the Windows right-click menu.
Please advise.
Hi Pierre.
Thank you for your answer.
I think you might have misunderstood. It is already set as my defaults, and “open with” also works perfectly fine. What I was referring to is the following:
There are similar articles here:
and here:
I used the words “it seems”, because these questions do not have any workable solutions to them.
Maybe there is a solution today?
Hmm - both are solved, so definitely the solutions were workable for the askers.
And installation of LibreOffice does associate files to the respective New entries. But the user (or a very kind operating system) may re-associate, say, ODT to something else; and then the New entry gets broken. See the answer to the first topic you linked to, which explains the mechanism in registry. Also in Installation has corrupted File Explorer New File settings - #6 by mikekaganski, and in Incomplete context menu in windows 10? - #3 by mikekaganski, and in Right-click in a Win11 folder > New > OpenDocument Text: Can it open a .doc file rather than .odt? - #5 by mikekaganski - in the last one, I tried to be very explicit and detailed.
Thank you Mike.
I think I reached the point where I should rather surrender and work without shortcuts, before I break my computer. I have changed the registry over and over and over - each time to a different solution found in this forum, Microsoft help, and other Windows forums.
Hopefully in future Windows and other apps will be more compatible. After all, no end user is supposed to fiddle with dev codes in order to make things work.
Thank you for your time.
As this feature actually works on most computers since long times, there is not much hope this will change in the future on your computer. The problem is to find out, what is different on your system…
When people decided to have personal computers they accepted(silently) to be their own admin. So, if you don’t have somebody who takes care of this, you are admin also. To drive a car on public streets you need a licence, you are just driving without licence, on your own area, so nobody will care, if it works or you do backups.
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If you really fiddled in registry etc, I’d stop searching for a reason. I’d remove LibreOffice including the user profile and then re-install Windows from scratch, afterwards LibreOffice. But make sure to have a full backup before you do this, including hidden stuff like %APPDATA% where Windows hides stuff like User-profile, Thunderbirds mails, bookmarks from Firefox etc. A usual install will have the Files in Context menu, unless you use a “portable” version wich usually is not integrated in the system.
Let me try to explain why there is nothing LibreOffice can do here.
The New functionality in Windows shell (Explorer) is a thing that is defined by Windows shell: it is that system component, which looks into specific places in system configuration, and then adds things that is finds in these places. The places are explained in Right-click in a Win11 folder > New > OpenDocument Text: Can it open a .doc file rather than .odt? - #5 by mikekaganski (which I already linked above). It happens that the New functionality is strictly bound to the file type associations (i.e., to the default program set up to open this or that file extension).
Since some time (was it Windows Vista?), MS has decided that they should make file file associations more “user-friendly”. There were lots of problems before - like applications forcefully changing file associations on program start (funnily, MS Office was one of the most offensive in that regard - at some point, e.g., they decided to associate ODTs with Word on each Word startup, so it was impossible to use LibreOffice together with MS Word on the same system, because Word hijacked ODT mercilessly); or like difficult procedure for a user to find out which of the installed applications is capable of opening a given file type. MS decided to disallow applications to change associations outside installation procedure; they introduced a mechanism for applications to advertise their capabilities (beyond the associations - so that an installer could tell Windows, that this app can open this and that, even if it’s not associated with this or that); they started to associate file types with applications automatically, when there was no other apps that can open these types, even when app itself didn’t associate (there are questions on this Ask site about PDFs auto-associated with Draw, when there was no other PDF readers on the system); and also MS started to ask user to re-consider, which app to use for file types that got new apps that can open them.
All that was aimed to make users’ lives better; but as always, that introduced own pile of problems. Your problem is one of those. Something happens on your system, which re-associates the files to something else, and breaks the New mechanism. It happens outside of LibreOffice. What could LibreOffice do? And of course, LibreOffice does not expect users to “fiddle with dev codes” - it did its part to make things just work for the user; but something else had a different idea. Users expect things just work; and generally, software is developed with the same idea … but with endlessly increasing internal complexity, it is simply impossible to imagine all thinkable combinations of factors (settings, installed applications, user choices, …) that could break things. LibreOffice keeps working, and everything that is completely under its control (i.e., how it operates after you started it) is OK; but something has changed outside; and people naturally tend to blame the “broken” application (in this case, LibreOffice), for what was not its fault.
blackbox testing with so many such tricky details is sort of haystack / needle game 
what about a last round of uninstall / install with proper logging ?
at least you’ll have a stable picture of what happens.
and maybe an enlightening error message.
Thank you, everyone.
LibreOffice is not at fault here. Somewhere there is something that causes this feature to not work, but like Pierre said: it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.
I am not going to change more registry entries trying to find that needle. I was hoping for a simple solution, but I see now that it will not be simple.
Therefore, I will rather use LibreOffice without shortcuts, than spending more long hours trying to fix an issue which is actually just a shortcut.
Reinstalling Windows is definitely not an option - It will take me a week, and I need to work.
Thank you again to all.
You can mark this as closed.
Workaround: Create your own empty/default file, save as template and place a link to it on your desktop or wherever you need it.
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Actually I use a special folder for this kind of files and have pinned this folder to Windows explorers favorites on the left. So I can create anybdocument placed there with 2 double clicks (and this survives even migrating from Win7 to Win10, as it is part of the file-system).