How to Repair the Desktop Shortcut Icon - (2024)

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In this video we're just going to go over a little troubleshooting issue. What happens if you double click your Run Proposal Pack Wizard icon and either nothing happens or it opens up in a different version (an older version) of Word. Or you just get something like this.

An error message saying the shortcut doesn't work anymore. Now there's nothing actually wrong with your Proposal Kit installation or your Wizard software. Everything's still there and everything works just fine.

It's only this shortcut link that is broken. Every time someone calls about this the first thing we ask is did you recently install a new version of Word and/or uninstall your old version of Word or Microsoft Office. The answer is always yes.

So what happens is if you get a broken link, that means you uninstalled your copy of Microsoft Office that this link was pointing to so that this link just can't find the Word program anymore. Or if it's opening up our Wizard in an older version of Word, say Office 2010 instead of your new Microsoft 365. That just means you installed a new version of Office on your computer but this desktop shortcut is still linked to the old copy (which still will work just fine).

We're going to show you how to fix this. And I'll show the actual issue here. If you just right click this shortcut and bring up the Properties box just look at the Target field.

You may be actually able to fix this just by editing this Target field if you really know what you're doing because this Target actually has a direct path to your WINWORD executable and you'll see in this video we've got it pointing to Microsoft Office 10 to the WINWORD executable. But we don't have an Office10 folder anymore in this computer because we uninstalled it after we installed a new Office 365. So all we would have to really do is go on to the computer into your File Explorer and find the new folder with your current version of Word.

It might be Office15 or Office16 or something else and just change that. If you're not really familiar with how to search around on your computer for specific versions of Office we have another way to fix this. You can just go directly to where you installed the Wizard in the first place and that folder defaults (unless you changed it) to the C: drive to a ProposalKit folder and a ProposalPack folder.

You can just use your File Explorer and we just happen to have our Wizard installed on our D: drive on this computer. But it should be on your C: drive in the ProposalKit/ProposalPack folder. Go find this file ProposalPack Wizard_Win10S_V15 if you don't have a 10S_V15 that means you have an older version of the Wizard so just find whatever file that has ProposalPack Wizard_Win_ and then the version number and open that.

Just double click and that'll open in whatever current version of Office you have installed. This is the Wizard that is normally linked to in the shortcut itself so this is just how to manually open the Wizard and execute the macro. Just click the Add–Ins tab the Run Wizard button.

This will get your Wizard running again because all this desktop shortcut here does is it opens this Word document and then runs the Wizard macro just like what we did here to manually open the document and then manually click the Add–Ins tab and Run Wizard button. Now once the Wizard's running click the Preferences button. Go to the Tools tab.

Click the Repair Tools button. And then there's a Repair Desktop Shortcut button. Click that and now the Wizard will have just rebuilt the icon here.

If you had deleted this icon off your desktop it will actually remake it from scratch. It's going to go locate the current installed version of Microsoft Office on your computer and set the link. So now that we've just done that we can close the window and we'll just close the Wizard completely.

Now we can right click the Properties and just double check what happened here. Now you can see this used to be Office10 and now it's Office16. So the Wizard has gone and located the newest copy of WINWORD which is now in your Office16 folder and updated the shortcut.

Now we can double click and run the Wzard. Now you see the desktop shortcut works. That is all you have to do to repair a desktop shortcut link that either doesn't work anymore or opens an old copy of Microsoft Office.