Excel icon changed on desktop

Microsoft Office is an essential part of our professional life. All of the important documents, files, presentations, and data are usually planned, written and secured in Microsoft office products such as Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

Among multiple technical problems regarding Microsoft office, we often run into a common issue which is missing Office icons [aka shortcuts] that can be an annoyance if you dont know any other ways to start the applications that run under Microsoft Office.

Here are some solutions you can try to fix missing Office icons in your computer before calling Boxaid for online technical help.

Restore File Associations

The first method to fix and bring the original office icons back from generic icons is to restore the files associations. File associations tell Windows which programs should be used to open a file. For example, if you open a music file like an .mp3 file it would be opened by your music player. Usually these file associations are built into Windows and always work fine but sometimes when you install a new program it may break file associations so they need to be manually fixed.

For window 7 and 8 click on the start and choose Default Program from All Programs option.

Find Associate a File Type or Protocol with a Program and click on it.

Here you will see a number of files open with their brief description and programs configured which you can open. Now locate your file, for example, Word document with the .doc extension.

Select the file and click the Change Program on the upper right corner.

Clicking will lead you to Open With options. Select Microsoft Word. If you dont see it in the options, click on the Browse and find Microsoft Word and choose it by clicking OK.

Using Microsoft Office Tools to Restore Missing Icons

Another way to fix the Microsoft Office icons is to approach Office Tools and open Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Click the Help option leading you to Detect and Repairin the drop-down menu.

Click Restore my Shortcuts while Repairing.

That will restore your Office icons smoothly and quickly

Clearing the Icon Cache

If the previous two options do not work for fixing your missing shortcut icons, you can also delete the file cache with the icons. This will force Windows to regenerate the icons and create a new cache.

Click Start and type Window Explorer for Window 7 and File Explorer for Window 10.

Go to the Tool menu and click Folder Options.

In Folder Options, go to the View tab and select Show hidden files, folders and drives and click Ok at the end.

Return to the desktop and go to the click Local Disk [C] and follow the following map.

Users > Administrators >AppData> Local

Now select the IconCache.db file and delete it with DELETE button from your keyboard

Select Yes on the prompt and restart your system.

We hope you found this article useful. Please visit our home page in case you need Boxaid for additional online tech help in the future. Our experts fix thousands of computers per year from the comfort of your home or business.