Open txt file in Notepad from SharePoint

Question

We are using WSS 3.0. We have a webpart that shows a list of documents in a document library.

If we click on a MS Word file with a doc extension, it opens in MS Word.

However, if we click on a text file with a txt extension, it opens in view mode in the browser.

Is there any way that we can get the txt file to open in notepad?

Answer 1

I don't think you can do that, unless you do some local registry hacks on each machine that opens files with the content tyep text/plain in notepad instead of in the browser.

The reason that you can open Office documents is that SharePoint uses ActiveX to invoke the office application with its ProgId. Notepad does not have any COM ProgId.

You could make it so that .txt documents are opened in Word though.

Answer 2

In SharePoint 2010 there is an Edit-Control-Block menu option to "Edit Document" that opens txt files in Notepad (and log for that matter). Tested on Team Site Shared Documents and Windows 7 x64 / Windows Server 2012 clients. At least with Office 2013 it works as shown below.