On Windows, icons are often deployed as resources within an EXE or DLL file. There is no built-in viewer on Windows for the multiple icons that are within the same file. Sometimes, you might want to see the list of icons so that you can use them for some purpose (e.g., I want to use different icons for Office 365 files). This post shows a simple way (workaround!?) to see these icons.

For EXE files

I found it easiest to make a shortcut to the EXE file on the desktop and then using that shortcut to check the icons in the file. Here’s what you need to do:

• Navigate to where the EXE file is, e.g., C:\Program Files\7-Zip and find the EXE file that you want to inspect.
• Create a shortcut on the desktop - a simple way is to right click on the EXE file (e.g., 7zFM.exe) and click on "Send To >" and then "Desktop (create shortcut)"
  
• Now, right click on the shortcut on the desktop and click on "Properties"
  
• That brings up the window below - click on "Change Icon" and it will show you all the icons inside the EXE file.
  

Normally, the icon for the EXE is one of the icons in the EXE itself – but you should always check the file name that “Change Icon…” shows is the same as the file that you want to look at.

For DLL files

Unfortunately, there does not seems to be an easy way to do this – the approach is the same as for EXE files: create a shortcut and try to change icon. Note that DLL files usually take their own icon from the Windows system (%SystemRoot%\System32\SHELL32.dll) and so, you need to check and navigate to the specific DLL from the “Change Icon…” and ensure that the DLL is selected in the field for “Look for icons in this file:”

This is probably the simplest way to view the icons in an EXE or DLL file.

Icons for Office Applications

For me, this quest started due to wanting to change the icons for office files. In older versions of Office, the icons would be stored in the EXE file, e.g., EXCEL.EXE and so on. Recently (I don’t know when), Microsoft started to bundle the icons for the applications separately also. All these special EXE files can be found at: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\vfs\Windows\Installer\{90160000-000F-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE} and if you go there, you will see files such as:

accicons.exe
dbcicons.exe
graph.ico
grv_icons.exe
joticon.exe
lyncicon.exe
misc.exe
osmclienticon.exe
outicon.exe
pj11icon.exe
pptico.exe
pubs.exe
sscicons.exe
visicon.exe
wordicon.exe
xlicons.exe

You’ll notice that most of these can be matched to the applications: Excel (xlicons.exe), Word (wordicon.exe), Powerpoint (pptico.exe), and so on. If you follow the method above, you’ll see the icons packaged in each of these files. For example, the picture below shows the icons inside xlicons.exe

You can see that a large number of different icons are present in the file. In places like the registry, sometimes, we want to refer to a specific icon – this is done by writing lines like the one below:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE,9

The number at the end is required to identify which icon is to be used. For future reference, the number scheme is as follows:

• Start at 0
• Count downwards first (0, 1, 2, 3)
• Then, from left to right (at least on L→R windows)

This is shown in the picture below. In one of the next posts, we will discuss how this knowledge can be used to change the icons that we show for the Office documents.

I added this information here to be able to remember how to do it since I want to make changes to the default icons for the Office files. If you have some comments, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to connect or share the post (you can tag me as @onghu on X or on Mastodon as @onghu@ruby.social or @onghu.com on Bluesky to discuss more).