How to open Microsoft Works XLR & WPS extentions with Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition (VM) in Windows 7

This article applies only to to virtual machine installation of Office 2010 Starter Edition in Windows 7... If your system came preloaded with stand-alone version of Office 2010 you should be able to map Microsoft Works file extensions like .wps or .xlr to Microsoft Word and Excel executables traditional way: right-click works document with extension you want to map, left-click Open With --> Choose Default Program... Browse to your Office 2010 installation directory under program files and select appropriate executable.

In our case new computer came preloaded with Office 2010 virtual machine with NO stand-alone  winword.exe or excel.exe, and the only way we could map our migrated Microsoft Works documents was to go to windows registry and do this manually... We have exported and saved .doc and .xls keys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry hive and modified exported registry (.reg) files replacing all .doc extension with .wps and all .xls extention with .xlr for end result to look like this:

 DOC-WPS.reg 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.wps]
@="Word.Document.8"
"Content Type"="application/msword"
"SoftGridSource"="{90140011-0066-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.wps\OpenWithProgIDs]
"Word.Document.8"=hex(0):

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.wps\PersistentHandler]
@="{98de59a0-d175-11cd-a7bd-00006b827d94}"

 XLS-XLR.reg 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xlr]
@="Excel.Sheet.8"
"Content Type"="application/vnd.ms-excel"
"SoftGridSource"="{90140011-0066-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xlr\OpenWithProgIDs]
"Excel.Sheet.8"=hex(0):

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xlr\PersistentHandler]
@="{98de59a0-d175-11cd-a7bd-00006b827d94}"

After saving edited registry files above we re-imported each file back into the registry and rebooted Windows 7...

Please note that your ID values can be different and you should probably verify these numbers first, before blindly copying registry values from this post - it's safer to export registry keys directly from your own registry, make necessary changes, and import them back. We do not have to tell you how much damage you can do to your system should something go wrong here, right?