TLC Tips of the Week:                          from Helen Olberg

Did you ever receive an email attachment that you could not open? … or, when you did open it, you got all sorts of gobble-de-goop, but not anything readable?

It is quite common here at COD for students to send their homework by email to be reviewed or graded. Occasionally, that attachment is not readable. What do you do?

A big clue to the problem lies in the file type (extension) of the attachment.  As a point of review, there are three things you must know about any file: its name, its location - drive and folder(s), and its file type – extension. You set these when you save a file

The extension indicates which application program should open/edit/print this file. Here’s a partial list of extensions commonly used here at COD and their associated application programs.

When you double-click the file icon, the associated program will open to read that file. Everything works fine when both the sender and the receiver have the same software programs.

The problem comes about when the sender and receiver do NOT have the same software application programs. You could buy and install all the additional software, but that can be expensive and time-consuming. Many of the software programs have ‘converters’ to allow translating files created by other software, but you will need to install them. You can also download and install converters from the internet. Wait! Don’t panic!

Here’s a better solution:

Email the sender that you can’t read his file attachment and ask him to

1. Save it in .doc or .rtf format. This does not mean that he simply renames the file! He must use File, Save As… and select the file type for the software that you have, or as Rich Text Format (.rtf).
2. Resend it to you in the new format.

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