So I just got a new iMac at work and the documents I save to my desktop no longer have the blue Word header, or the green Excel header on the little document icon on my desktop. Instead they're just little teeny tiny "previews" of my document, black & white. Is there a way to make these icons look like the use to, with the colored headers? It's very annoying to not be able to just do a quick visual scan of my desktop to see what's where - my eye picks up color much easier than it does text.

Highlight the document's icon. Use mouse to bring up menu. (I use a two-button mouse, it's the right button. It's probably a single click with the Mighty Mouse.) Select "Get Info." Go to "Open with:" and use the drop down list to find the app that you want to open that type of document with. Click "Change All..." A dialogue box will ask if you really want to assign that app to all documents with that extension. Choose "yes." The icon may not change immediately, but if it doesn't, a restart will probably fix that. Good luck!

D'oh! I got all the way through, and I was just about to sing your praises when I couldn't click "Change All". For some reason it's greyed out and unclickable.

That's very strange. Try going a little further down in that "Get Info" box and see if you can "change permissions" to "read and write." Otherwise, it sounds like the trial period for the MS products might have run out, if you don't have your own licensed copies. Not sure, but maybe there's some info at online Mac help boards?

Okay, now this is weird. I did what you described above, only this time I chose "other" in the Open With drop down menu and selected Word/Excel and then I was able to click Change All. I restarted and one of the documents on my desktop appeared with the old green Excel header, but all the others stayed the same. So I did it again, restarted again and they all showed up with the green/blue headers...for about half a second before changing back to the new-fangled colorless icons! Grrrrrrr...

On a more light-hearted note everyone in the office has been setting up iChat accounts at our Directors request (he's the one that insisted on buying me this new, massive iMac). But now I have to stay late and have a "video conference" when some other doctors show up...and the point of the video conference is just to show off iChat! We're not going to discuss anything!

Ah, a meta-meeting. Hm, hopefully there will only be one. I haven't used iChat yet. Did you get the 24" iMac?

Sorry to hear about the icon craziness. I'm out of fix-it ideas.

Yup, meeting was short and pointless with lots of waving. iChat works pretty well though. And yeah, I got the 24" - it's pretty nice!
Oh well, your suggestion tried to work, almost worked...I'll pass it onto IT and maybe they can figure out what's going on, but initially our Mac guru didn't know if it was possible. So thanks for at least pointing me/us in the right direction!

Right-click on your desktop and choose "Show view options" then uncheck "Show icon preview"

Thanks guys, got this taken care of! Looks so much better now...