I use Windows XP. This week, I discovered people receiving OE emails with my
WP attachments, but they are unable to open the attachments unless they have WP
or Word on their PCs. Why canât they just simply click on the attachment and
have it open?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #58, I look at the reasons why email attachments canât always be
opened by recipients.
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Software required to read files
Well, itâs kind of an asked and answered question. They canât click on the
attachment and have it open because they donât have software on their machine
that understands the attachment.
WP (I assume you mean WordPerfect) is a word processing program that saves
information in a particular format: in a WP file.
Word is the same way. Itâs a word processing program that saves information
in a particular way in a word processing file, a .doc (or a .docx with most
recent versions of Microsoft Word.)
If the receiver doesnât have a program that knows how to understand .doc or
.docx files or WordPerfect files (or whatever files youâre sending), then they
just canât open it. It requires software to be able to interpret the contents
of those files. Your mail program does not come with the knowledge of every
possible file type in the universe.
Software applications
Thatâs why we end up buying software applications.
-
We buy word processing programs so that we can create and understand word
processing documents. -
We buy spreadsheet programs so that we can create and understand spreadsheet
files and so on.
So, there are a couple of different solutions that Iâll go down for you.
Word is more common
One is use a more common file format. A file format that is more likely to
be on more of your recipientsâ machines.
Now, I canât guarantee any file format will actually be on all of their
machines, at least not something that youâre interested in using.
A more common file format could be Microsoft Word (a .doc file). WP (like I said, Iâm assuming itâs WordPerfect) is not as popular as it once was. Not many people have it. I wouldnât necessarily assume that anybody I would send a WP document to would have it. So instead, I would use your program to save it as a .doc file or .docx file to begin with.
Thatâs one approach.
Print to PDF
Another even more common file format thatâs useful for distributing
documents (that are not meant to be edited by the people who are receiving
them) is PDF.
There a couple of ways you can do that.
Many programs will actually allow you to save your document in PDF format.
If you do that, then you can email that PDF document to your recipients. Itâs
likely that they will be able to read them because PDFs are so common that PDF
readers are typically, eventually installed by most computer users.
Windows doesnât actually come with a PDF reader, but PDF files are so common
that itâs not long before, just in the natural course of events, someone will
end up wanting it to be able to read a PDF document so they will go out and get
Adobe Reader or FoxIt or something like that.
So, use .doc, maybe a PDF is another really good approach to sending
documents that have a very high likelihood of other people being able to open
them.
Insist on common programs
If you insist on using a specific file format that you care about, the only
solution is to make sure to insist that your recipients have some kind of a
program that can read that file.
The mail program is not enough.
In the case of a document file, itâs possible that a free program like Open
Office or Libre Office may be able to open these documents. You could simply
insist that rather than purchasing a piece of software your recipients might
need to go download and install the free Open Office package and then theyâd be
able to read these attachments.
Iâm not sure if they understand WP documents. Donât get me wrong. Iâm not
committing to that, but thatâs the direction you need to look in.
It really is a simple fact of the matter that a computer out of the box, an
email program out of the box, simply canât read every possible file format. Your
recipients do need to have the software that understands what it is youâre
sending them in order for them to be able to read it at all.
Next from Answercast 58 â My
power options include an active or passive CPU setting. Which do I want?
A free Open Source program called OpenOffice.org can open just about any document.
Windows comes with a program which can read .doc and .rtf files. Itâs called Word Pad and it comes with all versions of Windows. It also reads .docx files, but older versions of Windows canât read it, so your best bet is to save your files in .doc or .rtf formats and youâll have a format that over 99% of peopleâs computers can read. Linux and MacOS also come with programs which can read .doc and .rtf files.
I use and recommend Open Office too, but with a word of warning.
Not everything that âworksâ in other formats will âworkâ when opened with Open Office. Some formatting is simply not compatible. That said, I still use Wordpad or Notepad, for things that do not need to be fancy or contain graphics â and a .TXT is hard to beat for small file sizes.
Word Viewer is a free MS app that opens Word files.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4