Every document or file you save on your Mac is associated with a particular application, so when you try to open it, it always opens with that app, not another app, when you double-click that file’s icon in the Finder. However, you can change the default app that opens a file. For example, so that presentations made with PowerPoint are always opened with Keynote. Let’s figure out how to do it.
Change the default app you use to open a file
Sometimes, you may want an app to open certain file types by default. For example, use VLC to open all.avi files instead of QuickTime, which will not play them for you. Or as I said before, open all the presentations you receive or download in Keynote, and forget about PowerPoint.
In the Finder window, or on the desktop, right-click the file whose default startup application you want to change.
From the context menu, select Open with → Other…
A new window will appear for you to select an app to open the selected file with. In our example, we are going to select Keynote, even though, as you can see in the image above, it already appears in the conceptual menu because I recently used it for this type of file.
- Find and select the app you want to use (Keynote, in this case).
- Check the box “Always open with this application”.
- Press “Open”.
The selected file will be opened with the app you have indicated, but the most important thing is that whenever you want to open this type of macOS file it will be opened by default with the application you have just indicated.