emailing Word documents

[Slater Tubman]

Often when I email Word 2004 documents my PC friends say that they are
unable to open them. These are just regular .doc files attached to the email
message (using Mail as the mail program).
I then have to open the document, Select All, Copy and then paste it in to
the message area of the Mail program. Formatting suffers when doing this.
Which end of the email is the problem on? Should I be converting the
document prior to sending it? Or what?
I am a "convert" to Mac after a lifetime (so to speakl) in Windows land, so am
familiar with both ends.
Thanks for any information you may supply. Slater.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Slater,

It's not the Word document format that's at fault. Going back to at least
Word 97, both PCs and Macs can read the same Word doc.

Chances are it's an encoding issue. I haven't used Mail so I don't know
what the encoding options are but in Entourage, for instance, you can choose
to encode your attachments in various ways, including "Windows (MIME/Base
64)".

Also, be sure the .doc extension is appended to the file.

Another possibility: Did you compress the attachment?

Have the Windows recipients tried saving the files to the desktop and then
opening them from within Word using File>Open?

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Elliott Roper]

Often when I email Word 2004 documents my PC friends say that they are
unable to open them. These are just regular .doc files attached to the email
message (using Mail as the mail program).
I then have to open the document, Select All, Copy and then paste it in to
the message area of the Mail program. Formatting suffers when doing this.
Which end of the email is the problem on? Should I be converting the
document prior to sending it? Or what?
I am a "convert" to Mac after a lifetime (so to speakl) in Windows land, so
am
familiar with both ends.
Thanks for any information you may supply. Slater.

It just works!

In Mail go to edit->attachments and choose "always send windows
friendly attachments"

This will send the attachments base-64 enocoded and without a separate
file for the resource fork of a Mac file if one were available (usually
not for Word docs)

See what works by testing between different PC users with different
mail programs.