items from the mind of an idiot savant

not fit for print

Hey Rick! I recently installed Acrobat and now all my PDF files open with Acrobat instead of Preview. How do I change this?

This one’s not just for Acrobat, but for any program. Filetypes get associated with certain programs. When you double click a file it will open that file in the associated program. By default double clicking .txt files opens them in TextEdit. But let’s say you always want to open .txt files with BBEdit, TextWrangler, Microsoft Word, or whatever. Just do this:

In the finder, located a .txt, or the or .pdf as in the original question.
Click the file once to select it, and choose get info from the file menu.
In the resulting properties window, locate the area labeled “Open with:”. It may be hidden and you may need to click the little triangle to expose the area.
From the drop down menu, select the program you want to associate to that type of file.
Click “Change All…”

Now all your .pdf, .txt, or whatever type of file you got the info for will open with the program of your choice when you double click them.

It’s worth remembering that when you install new programs, sometimes they will change these settings, but you can always change them back.