New installation of LibreOffice installed horrible file extension icons

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#1

I was a happy user of LO 7.3 for last few years, and I (unfortunately?) decided to upgrade. Program works fine – but it changed all the filesystem icons (the new .xls, .doc icons are horrible, funny enough .ppt is OK, but I think it’s because it’s still tied to MSOffice).
How do I get my old (7.3 style) icons back, withouth installing suspicious 3rd party programs? Windows 11.
Google’d, DuckDuck’ed, all point to either articles from 2018 (same as this page, where it’s either Windows 10 or talks about the toolbar icons) or suggest to install suspicious software.
I’d like my old filesystem (File Manager) icons back.

These new horrible .xls icons:
image

Plus, it’s was rather annoying that I had to create yet-another account, just to open this Q. Suggestion: allow asking questions via LibreOffice itself? It’s 21st century after all :wink:
Sorry, I’m grumpy. Icons.

#3

You laugh, seńor, but my eyes are hurting. Who invented an icon “let’s just put all the green stuff into a tiny space”. Ugh.

#5

Introduced in tdf#132398.

1 Like
#6

This is intentional. It’s a reminder to always store your work in the native file format of the application you are using and convert to foreign formats when absolutely needed.

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#7

… huh? The application icons are a reminder to store in native file formats? :slight_smile: I think it’s a joke. This is just a new icon design, and has no back thought in it, other than some design team consensus on what they believe the best icon set for a new version.

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#8

For what it’s worth, since most of the “answers” here were “stop whining, and use the old 7.3 again” (and only Mike’s answer was explaining what is going on - thank you Mike), I decided to follow the Google method and use a (potentially unwanted) 3rd party application. The one I used is called “FileTypesMan” (free, from NirSoft) and changed the icons to those offered by MS Excel and MS Word binaries (for a source of the icon, go to your MS Office directory and pick excel.exe or winword.exe). Not the best outcome but I can live with it.
However - maybe anyone could point me in the right direction - how could I reconfigure it to use my old LibO6 MIME icons (File:LibO6 MIME.svg - The Document Foundation Wiki)? These are not available in soffice.bin/.exe files (LO 7.5).

#9

You should open doc(x), xls(x), ppt(x) with MS Office anyway. Why this circumstance?

2 Likes
#10

You can trust the NirSoft Tools, Microsoft bought the company. But as usual: Check where you download.
.

Just try. Most older methods work, as it is not important in the registry, if MS puts round edges at windows…

You can steal from a backup of your system, if you have. Otherwise older versions of LibreOffice are also available on the download-page. Just scroll down to the hint to use the “archive”.

#11

Appreciate the suggestion - but on the Download Archive I can only download .msi installer files, not the sole soffice.exe (or .ico/.dll), where I could get my lovely old filesystem icons.

[update] I downloaded the whole massive 332MB MSI (just to get some icons…), tried to open it using another set of potentially unwanted 3rd party software (LessMSI - Windows blocked opening that software, had to manipulate the Quarantine settings, which you won’t be able to do if you don’t have admin priviledges on your computer), finally was able to extract old (LO7.3) versions of scalc.exe and swriter.exe and use that previously mentioned FileTypesMan tool to set the icons. All took me a good part of the hour to configure. smh
And now also it seems I need to keep both of those two old scalc/swriter files somewhere on my filesystem (forever?) just to be able to have proper, old, nice icons across reboots, across LO upgrades.

So to summarize: if you want old style of filesystem icons, you need to download 300MB of old LibreOffice, install two (potentially unwanted) pieces of software, and forever keep two old .exe files just so the system can find the old nice-looking icons after the next inevitable LO upgrade.

Note to developers – guys, why did you make it so difficult for normal users? Why not give the user a choice “do you want new, high-visibility filesystem icons, or do you prefer old ones”? Don’t make our lives miserable. Each user has their own design preference. I’m a boomer, I prefer my old icons. Giving us a choice is never a bad thing. Forcing us to adopt something - usually is.

#12

You would be surprised… The “why are there so many settings” group is also quick to complain. For Linux we have gnome (minimalistic choices) vs KDE (tweak everything), but it is the same everywhere.

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#13

… and also users forget that the “never a bad thing” requires work. Not a one-time work to (1) add new icons keeping old ones (so, introduce new identifiers, make sure to not introduce conflicts), (2) add options to installer, so that it provides the choice to users, and writes different registry values to refer to the chosen icons; but also continuous work to keep the multiplying icon sets in sync with changing requirements - when users say “your icons look pixelated on my shiny new OS that uses 1024 pixel icons; go and create new sizes to please it”…

The extra complexity is not only “never a bad thing”, but also always is a source of more bugs/complaints. And who must do it is … volunteers, not someone paid for their work.

So to answer “why”: because this is the amount of work that makes volunteer developer’s work pleasing. And what you wanted is not so.

A tip: MSIs are easily opened by 7-Zip (if you use it).
Another tip: the old ICO files are available separately in the commit in the bug that I referenced above.

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/143885

Opening this page, you will see the list of the ICO files. There is a EXPAND ALL button that allows to see all the ICO images; or you may click on each file’s header’s arrow down to expand individually. Clicking on the file name would open the page which allows to download either left, or right variant.

1 Like
#14

@mikekaganski already showed you an easier way, but if you wish to use only system tools try google with:

powershell extract icon file from msi

and you may find something like:

PS: and you could use a backup. If you don’t have one, consider changing this.

PPS: Consider to keep the files you used to install (I keep an archive in my downloads-folders). Sometimes the original msi is needed to remove software and you avoid your

#15

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn’t it be easy just to offer those icons (both old and new) in the soffice.exe file? Just like shell.dll has hundreds of icons in it (so users can customize their look), soffice.exe only has ~10 icons (and only the new ones). Would it be difficult to keep ~30 icons (both the new high-visibility ones, but also the older ones) in that file? Yes, that would still force the user to get the FileTypesMan-like application to be able to change anything (due to limitations of Windows 11 that honestly I wasn’t aware of), but users of older Windows plaftorms wouldn’t have so much hassle (it was way easier to change default extension icons there). Again, perhaps I have no idea how it works and how difficult it would be.

This - this is splendid! Thank you very much.

#16

Whoa, way too advanced for me :slight_smile: Thank you, will read that, wonder how much will I comprehend.
(I see that there is “download Get-Icon” at the end but I’d rather understand what it does - and how - beforehand)

Easier said than done if your laptop has a 250GB hard drive. :slight_smile:
(yes, external USB hard drives - but I leave mine at home, work-travel really a lot and don’t want to carry it with me, even if for safety reasons)

#17

Just having them in the EXE would be easy, yes - if you do not use those older ones in any way in the program.

But this immediately creates the concern about bloat. Because it is exactly that. If only it was used somehow in the program, it would be justifiable - but not in this case. And the increased binary / installer size (even by a few hundred kilobytes) would immediately be caught, and the developers would be tarred and feathered.

#18

I get the “bloating” idea. But, perhaps, just a (new?) file sicons.dll (or similar; easy to figure-out-what-it-is name, with ‘s’ in front to keep it consistent, those few hundred kilobytes) with the contents of the https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/143885 webpage you’ve offered? That page is the bomb - but perhaps it would be easier for future users to have it in the package (or perhaps not, perhaps I’m the only person on the planet with that ‘problem’ – and they can google their problem, and perhaps they will find this exact webpage to solve it, instead of ancient 2018 ones).

#19

I suggest you just create a package with those icons, and provide such a ZIP in your blog - that is a reasonable idea to have it, but not a reasonable pastime for LibreOffice developers. Everything is open in the open source project; everyone can contribute; such a package would be a nice contribution from someone really interested in this piece.

#20

I decided to follow your suggestion, and did just that: How to get the old icons back.
Hopefully it’ll help another boomer in their search for old-but-good icons :slight_smile:

1 Like
#22

First of all: I have found a good, simple and practicable solution to be able to continue running LO installations ≥ version 7.5 with the old icon set (since version 6.1). (However, creating this solution and researching it took me two days).

But before I present the solution (below), I would like to agree with the criticism of the thread starter and go into a little more detail. For some time now, all kinds of software companies have had the bad habit of replacing the old branding icons with new ones, and each time the newer icons have fewer contours but more garish colors. Here, with the new icon set of LO, the following was even worse: If you have more than a few LO files (or at least shortcuts to LO files) on your desktop, then the new icons look really brutal, and this new appearance as a whole was so unbearable (at least for me) that I took a lot of time to get rid of this problem, since LO Writer is my most used program on my computer. Another point of the aforementioned “bad habit” is that humans – young and old – are actually “creatures of habit”. But if this is the case – and it is indeed the case – why are icons that we have become accustomed to changed again and again at such short intervals? I don’t believe that there are any (LO) users who want this, and if they do, they are probably very few. There are completely different things that users want, e.g. that the problem with the double line style of borders that has existed since version 6.0.0.1 is finally solved or that the current scaling factor problem is not pointlessly obstructed by the (paid) people in charge instead of supporting those who want to improve LO in their free time. But for new (questionable) icons that nobody needs and that probably nobody “ordered” – there is time for that.

But now to the (promised) solution: I tried the FileTypesMan tool mentioned above and discovered that the registry always refers to the same file regarding the default icons, namely soffice.bin. So I thought to myself, if I just save the soffice.bin from the last LO suite (7.4.7.2), copy it to a different folder than the already existing soffice.bin of the current installation and change the registry entries accordingly, I will get the old icons in a new installation as well. This assumption was confirmed.

So I laboriously copied out all 197 registry entries that refer to the default icon of LO and created a reg file that I can easily use for future installations. I changed the original path of each entry (@=“C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program…”) to @=“C:\ProgramData\LibreOffice\program…”.

For a new installation, proceed as follows: First install the new version of LO, but do not open a program, but restart. After the restart, first create a folder “LibreOffice” under C:\ProgramData and then a folder “program” underneath. Copy the saved soffice.bin from the last version with the old icons into this folder. Now double-click the created reg file, restart the computer and the old icons are back in the shortcuts.

Incidentally, it does not matter whether you use a soffice.bin (v. 7.4.7.2) from a 32-bit or 64-bit installation. Both files work with both 32-bit and 64-bit installations.

Since neither *.bin nor *.reg files can be uploaded in this forum, I have presented the solution (including a zip file with both files) to the thread starter drunkencommie, who uploaded his effort to solve the problem to GitHub.

Greetings,
Ransom1

#23

Here is the link to GitHub.

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