I have a friend using AOL Email on Windows 7. She is unable to open attachments from within an email. When she clicks on View (the Document) she gets garbage characters in the document. If I download the document and open it with Word, it works fine. She is 88 and I am trying to help her out. Any ideas?
Does she have a program on her computer to view the "document" you send?
Are you sending a doc or docx file?
If so, try sending either a rtf or pdf. Most everyone has programs to open either of those two files.
So far this has happened only with docx files. She does have MS Word on her computer. I will send her a few other test file formats and see what happens. I will report back. I will be seeing her tomorrow.
If the version is lower than Office 2007, she won't be able to view docx files unless she either has a viewer or installs the MS Compatibility Pack. (This gets cumbersome because there are service packs, updates and patches. I'd think for an 88 year old, a simple file viewer would be the easier option. My husband is in his mid 70's and I had to install something so he could read docx files he occasionally receives. )
Thank you everyone for your replies. Miraculously I was at my friends home today. I had sent her an email with three file types to test and they all opened just fine. I don't understand what happened previously and why all of a sudden it now works! Just FYI, she is running Office 2010. I will close this thread now.
A forum community dedicated to tech experts and enthusiasts. Come join the discussion about articles, computer security, Mac, Microsoft, Linux, hardware, networking, gaming, reviews, accessories, and more!