Change appearance of desktop icons

I am fairly new to OS X so please be gentle.

I have an excel spreadsheet icon on my desktop, which occasionally needs updating with new information. Rather than have the standard excel icon I have downloaded a .png graphic and used that to change the appearance of the icon - it is actually a padlock now.

Everything works fine until I update the information in that spreadsheet and save it. The icon then reverts to the standard excel icon.

I have gone into ...Get Info and tried locking it but it doesn't make any difference.

Any ideas on how to make the icon stay the same?

First thought: Put the document in a folder in Documents. Does it still do the same thing as before?

Second thought: In that folder, open Show View Options. Play with the icon settings, Show Icon Preview, I think it's called. You only have two choices: check it or uncheck it.

Thanks for your reply.

Tried what you said for both suggestions and different settings.

Whatever I did the icon reverted to standard excel as soon as I tried to save it after editing.

I'll keep watching this space.

Any ideas on how to make the icon stay the same?

Click to expand...

I don't think you can. At least I don't know of a way since each time you make changes the file gets re-written. The Excel icon on the Dock or Sidebar can be changed and it will stick but the icon which is displayed for the file will only stay as long as the file is not re-written.

I was afraid of that.

Having just moved to a Mac after 25 years of windows I am still getting used to the different behaviour of files etc. It wasn't a problem in Windows but that is a small price to pay for the overall benefits of OS X

Thanks for your response.

I did it!

I found out where I was going wrong.

In windows a copy of the file would have been sent to the desktop as a shortcut. That facility did not appear to be available on my iMac so I'd made a duplicate and moved that to the desktop resulting in the problems with appearance changing.

I now realise that to create a desktop shortcut you have to create an alias and having done that I no longer have the problem:Blushing:

An alternative would be to drag the file's icon to the Dock. It will make an alias there, and not take up a spot on the Desktop.

Good idea!