This afternoon I received an email with an attachment from a co-worker. She happens to sit across the aisle from me and, before I’d even realized I had an email to look at, she said, “That file won’t open for some reason, but it opens in Excel.”
Curious, I went to see what she was talking about. Here is an (edited) shot of the header of that email:
Email header from Outlook, showing the attachment.
Did you notice the generic-looking icon on that attachment? This is the primary clue to what’s wrong with this file: it doesn’t know what program it belongs to.
When I tried to double-click on it, I got this dialog box:
Choose a program to try to open the attachment.
Now, in this case, I already knew it was an Excel file–since my co-worker was sitting right next to me and told me so–but what would you do if you didn’t know? I would try the most likely programs first, such as Excel or Word. You might have an idea based on who sent it and why. If necessary, you could try every program until you find the right one. Eventually, you will find one that works (presuming that you have the necessary application on your computer).
That solves the problem of opening the attachment, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the generic icon. If you don’t fix that, you’ll have to go through the dialog box every time you want to open the file.
The generic icon, by the way, is not the source of the problem but a symptom of it. The real problem is that the file does not have an extension. The file name is “october 2008″ with no “.xls” after it. The extension–the part after the period–is what tells the computer which program to open the file with. Different extensions “belong” to different applications. For instance, “.xls” denotes an Excel file and “.doc” is a Word file. There are many, many possible extensions.
To fix this problem, you should save the attachment to your hard drive. (Generally, you should do this anyway so that you’ll be able to find the document if you want to view it again or make changes to it.) I made a few samples for demonstration:
Here we have two familiar icons, and two generic ones
“Example 1 copy” is actually a duplicate of “Example 1.xls” but because the file name is missing the extension, the icon is generic and under “Type” you can see that Windows can’t identify the file. The file with the Excel icon is described as a “Microsoft Office Excel 97-2003 Worksheet.” Similarly, “Example 2 copy” is a duplicate of “Example 2.doc,” a Word file, also missing its extension. Once I correct the problem by adding the extensions to the duplicate files, my file listing looks like this:
The duplicate files now have extensions, appropriate icons, and descriptions
Ta-da! No more generic icons, and Windows is fully aware of what type of files the duplicates are.
Note: If Windows is not showing you the extensions in your file listings, you can turn that option on in Settings. Adding the missing extension will work even if you do not turn that option on, though. Also, when you change, add, or delete an extension Windows may pop up a warning regarding the change. In this case, you really do want to change (or add) the extension so go ahead and say okay.
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