Hi Julian:
The error is probably at their end: it is a configuration problem with their
email program.
Make sure that your SENDING format is "MIME". Sending in AppleDouble can
lead to these problems if the email client at the other end is
misconfigured.
Also: make certain that you are sending the file extension ".docx" at the
end of the file name.
If you are doing both of these things, it should work (normally, a Windows
system does not need the file extension, but if they misconfigure it badly
enough, it can fall back on the .docx extension to tell it what kind of file
this is.)
It is worth telling them to save the file to their hard disk before
attempting to open it, and to open it using File>Open instead of
double-clicking it. Depending on how badly they've pooched things at their
end (or their System Administrator has...) these techniques can give Word a
better chance of figuring out what is happening.
If they are using Word 2003, their administrator should have installed the
XML converter allowing them to read .docx files. If that converter has been
correctly installed, it will just open a .docx file straight up. It sounds
as though it hasn't been installed correctly.
Companies using Lotus Notes as the email client quite often have this
problem: Lotus Notes has a very bad habit of marking new Word document
formats as the old document format. So Word gets an instruction from Notes
to open "an old format document" then gets handed a "new format document".
It gets very confused. Saving to the desktop so Notes gets out of the loop
can fix this.
You should not have to do anything: the problem is theirs to solve, but
those steps above might give you a better chance of helping them. If all
else fails, you can save a COPY back to Word 2004 .doc version and send them
the copy. That will break or mangle any of the new Word 2008 features you
have been using in the document, but that won't matter so much at their end
since their version of Word can't read them properly anyway. But don't save
your version in .doc format or you will lose data (and the files are more
than double the size!).
Hope this helps
Hi John
thanks for replying so fast. the documents are saved as .doc as that is the
only file type my office in London can receive. they worked fine for the last
few months until this week. I guess that they may have Office XP rather than
2003.
there are no pictures in the document just text in a table. there are no
compatibility issues with the files.
NOt sure what else to say. fonts are the same as i've been using for the last
few months.
any ideas?
Julian Adams
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
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