Why can’t my recipients open the documents I email them?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #58, I look at the reasons why email attachments can’t always be
opened by recipients.

Software required to read files

Well, it’s kind of an asked and answered question. They can’t click on the
attachment and have it open because they don’t have software on their machine
that understands the attachment.

WP (I assume you mean WordPerfect) is a word processing program that saves
information in a particular format: in a WP file.

Word is the same way. It’s a word processing program that saves information
in a particular way in a word processing file, a .doc (or a .docx with most
recent versions of Microsoft Word.)

If the receiver doesn’t have a program that knows how to understand .doc or
.docx files or WordPerfect files (or whatever files you’re sending), then they
just can’t open it. It requires software to be able to interpret the contents
of those files. Your mail program does not come with the knowledge of every
possible file type in the universe.

Software applications

That’s why we end up buying software applications.

• We buy word processing programs so that we can create and understand word
  processing documents.

• We buy spreadsheet programs so that we can create and understand spreadsheet
  files and so on.

So, there are a couple of different solutions that I’ll go down for you.

Word is more common

One is use a more common file format. A file format that is more likely to
be on more of your recipients’ machines.

Now, I can’t guarantee any file format will actually be on all of their
machines, at least not something that you’re interested in using.

A more common file format could be Microsoft Word (a .doc file). WP (like I said, I’m assuming it’s WordPerfect) is not as popular as it once was. Not many people have it. I wouldn’t necessarily assume that anybody I would send a WP document to would have it. So instead, I would use your program to save it as a .doc file or .docx file to begin with.

That’s one approach.

Print to PDF

Another even more common file format that’s useful for distributing
documents (that are not meant to be edited by the people who are receiving
them) is PDF.

There a couple of ways you can do that.

Many programs will actually allow you to save your document in PDF format.
If you do that, then you can email that PDF document to your recipients. It’s
likely that they will be able to read them because PDFs are so common that PDF
readers are typically, eventually installed by most computer users.

Windows doesn’t actually come with a PDF reader, but PDF files are so common
that it’s not long before, just in the natural course of events, someone will
end up wanting it to be able to read a PDF document so they will go out and get
Adobe Reader or FoxIt or something like that.

So, use .doc, maybe a PDF is another really good approach to sending
documents that have a very high likelihood of other people being able to open
them.

Insist on common programs

If you insist on using a specific file format that you care about, the only
solution is to make sure to insist that your recipients have some kind of a
program that can read that file.

The mail program is not enough.

In the case of a document file, it’s possible that a free program like Open
Office or Libre Office may be able to open these documents. You could simply
insist that rather than purchasing a piece of software your recipients might
need to go download and install the free Open Office package and then they’d be
able to read these attachments.

I’m not sure if they understand WP documents. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not
committing to that, but that’s the direction you need to look in.

It really is a simple fact of the matter that a computer out of the box, an
email program out of the box, simply can’t read every possible file format. Your
recipients do need to have the software that understands what it is you’re
sending them in order for them to be able to read it at all.