Hotmail attachments on a Mac

[rterry]

I am a Mac rookie and my wife is a computer rookie. She refuses to use anything other than hotmail for email. We have MS office for Mac 2004. When she attaches a word document and sends it to her friends, who all use pc, they cannot open the attachments. We are using Leopard and Firefox as the browser. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[j.bond312]

What sort of file are you sending e.g the format of the document when you save it to your computer such as (.docx, .doc etc), how are you sending the file (in a zipped file, or just the word document alone), do you mean they cant open the attachment from there e-mail or theyve downloaded the attachment and the file will not open, or does not open correctly?

Also what version of Office do your friends have?

Also i have heard that office 2007 files are not compatible wit mac 2004, yet i dont know if this is the same the other way round.

Although to me it sounds like a comptability issue.

 

[rterry]

I am referring to MS Word for Mac 2004. I run Leopard 10.5.x. The files are saved on the Mac as .doc My wife attaches the word document to a hotmail message and sends to multiple friends. She sent it to me at work. I am running Windows XP at work with MS office 2007.

When the document shows in the outlook message window it has no extension. I am able to open it fine by telling outlook to use Microsoft Word when prompted. I don't really know what OS or version of Windows her friends are using (she has hundreds of them), but I do know that most of them are fairly computer illeterate and only use hotmail. It would be best if they could just open the file without relating a software program to it. Thanks for any help.

 

[j.bond312]

okay, well .doc extensions should be able to be viewed on any version of microsoft office mac or windows without any problems.

As for the file not showing any extension in the e-mail attachments is weird, therefore if the same is happening to her friends, then they should try and add the file extension themselves and give it the .doc extension and then open it up in word.

Also the e-mail client shouldnt make a difference in opening attachments, aslong as they make sure that they are downloading a local copy of the attachments to there computers rather than opening from the e-mail client, although i do agree that hotmail does suck!

Other than that theres not much advice that i can give without knowing what exactly is happening when the file is being opened and any error messages that appear etc.

 

[rterry]

Thanks for the help. I haven't had time to do much more research on this. I will get with my wife today and try to figure out why the attachment is not going through with the extension. I would think that MS Word for Mac would automatically give it a .doc extension, but I will check to make sure she isn't saving it incorrectly.