unknown extension

[Sandy]

I had a serious problem with my computer, and it also killed my backup
drive. Long story, and not necessary here. At any rate, I had some of my
files recovered, and I'm stumped about the extension on them. The
recovered files no longer have their original titles, of course, so I
have to open each one to figure out what it is. Some of the ones that
were recovered and placed into folders for Office docs have the obvious
..doc, .ppt and .xls extensions, but a lot have an extension ".ole" that
I've never seen before. Can anyone tell me what opens these?

Thanks!

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

OLE is Object Linking and Embedding. It's a "work file" (a temporary file)
that you can ignore/delete.

If you knew which folder it belonged in, and you placed each OLE in its
correct folder, the application that was using may use the content of the
file to update a document. These are "components" that have been embedded
in documents. For example, a PowerPoint slide, or part of an Excel
spreadsheet.

Normally if the application can't find the OLE file that was used, it will
simply break the link within the document and use the stored version inside
the document. The spreadsheet or whatever will not update if the original
does.

If you are the sort of person who has lots of linked spreadsheets that you
are relying on to update each other, you would then have to go through them
all and find out which ones have broken links.

If you're a normal user, just delete the files and forget about them!

The files need to be deleted anyway, because they're only useful if you can
get them back into their exactly correct folders and associated with their
correct master files, and the master files have not been opened before you
do that.

Trash 'em

Cheers

I had a serious problem with my computer, and it also killed my backup
drive. Long story, and not necessary here. At any rate, I had some of my
files recovered, and I'm stumped about the extension on them. The
recovered files no longer have their original titles, of course, so I
have to open each one to figure out what it is. Some of the ones that
were recovered and placed into folders for Office docs have the obvious
.doc, .ppt and .xls extensions, but a lot have an extension ".ole" that

I've never seen before. Can anyone tell me what opens these?

Thanks!

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Sandy Foster]

OLE is Object Linking and Embedding. It's a "work file" (a temporary file)
that you can ignore/delete.

Whew! <G>

If you're a normal user, just delete the files and forget about them!

That's me -- a "normal" user!

The files need to be deleted anyway, because they're only useful if you can
get them back into their exactly correct folders and associated with their
correct master files, and the master files have not been opened before you
do that.

Trash 'em

Thanks so much for this information, John! It really sets my mind at
rest.