If you’ve updated to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) then you’ve likely noticed that the binding between documents and the applications that created them is frequently broken.

That is, create a document in BBEdit and save it to the desktop. Now double-click that document. It may open in Safari, in Textedit, in Word, or, if you’re lucky in BBEdit.

This is intentional on Apple’s part; it is not a mistake. (In the pre-10.6 days, each document had a hidden type code and a hidden creator code, and the Finder used these to link between the document and its creator. That’s not being done anymore… and needless to say, that’s inconvenient.)

That said, all that’s left is the document’s (sometimes) hidden suffix, such as “.txt” or “.doc” or “.html” and so on.

Now you can make one program open ALL documents that end with “.txt” by highlighting the document, and pressing command-i. In the resulting GetInfo box, select the “Open with:” section; pick the application you’d like to use to open the file; and then click the “Change All…” button.

But that suffers from making -all- documents that end with that suffix open in just one program… which may or may not be the application that actually created it.

So, here’s what I did.

First, I did go ahead and set up my “default” applications, as described above.

Then, using Automator (which is the point of this article) I easily made services to open documents with a specific application.

That is: I control click on the document, and from the resulting menu, choose “Services/Preview” or “Services/Textedit” or whatever app I want to use.

For example, I generally prefer to use Acrobat to read my PDF files. However, Acrobat takes forever to print them, so if I’m printing, I want to open them in Preview (which for reasons I don’t understand, seems to print PDFs much faster.)

So, using the GetInfo technique, I’ve set PDFs to open in Acrobat.

Then, to make an item that will appear in the contextual menu when I control-click on a document, I ran Automator.

When Automator comes up, I chose to make a new Service. (If you don’t see the choices, choose “New” from the File menu, and click on the Service icon.)

Next, make sure that “Library” is highlighted in the left-most column. Then, in the next column over, find the item “Open Finder Items.”

Click and hold and drag “Open Finder Items” to the large area on the right, and it will open, revealing a popup menu, which initially says “Default Application.”

Using that popup menu, select the application you want to use. (If you can’t find it, there’s an “Other…” at the bottom of the menu list.)

That’s it. Now just choose Save from the main file menu, and give your new service a name. (I choose “ow Acrobat” or “ow TextEdit” and so on where the “ow” simply means to me “Open With”. Pick whatever is meaningful to you.)

Once you’ve named it, hit the “save” button, and you’re done. You can quit automator, or make some more “Open With…” services if you like.

To use your new Service, control-click on the document in the finder, choose “Services…” and your new service.

This whole process takes much longer to describe than it does to do, and once you’ve done one, you’ll find yourself doing many.

Automator is a very handy tool, and very easy to use. We’ll cover more of it later.