Sunday, March 30, 2008

Fussy macs?

Another interesting wee glitch involving Mac apps. My pal Di and I write church reports for the local paper. Because we try to make them different from the average church report, we tend to concoct them on one of our wet walks or while recovering from same over a cuppa. She then mails them as an attachment to my Powerbook for me to forward to the paper. All very straightforward.

Well no, actually. Di uses Mail on her mac powerbook; I gave that up after the demise of my relationship with Demon and now use Googlemail on Firefox. But if I try to open the file - which I know fine well began life as a Word file - it appears as a Quicktime movie which then can't be opened. However, if I open the mail in Safari (and you'll recall I don't do this right now 'cos I can only write lower-case mails on Safari) it opens nae bother.

So, for all my friendly geeks out there: does mac only speak to mac these days?

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:47 AM

    I have the same problem but I haven't tried using Safari.I use Camino and gmail. It's to do with the word processor they created it with.Maybe Safari auto converts it? It's the file type .wpd. It needs to be opened with NeoOffice (like Open Office but for the mac) then it's fine. My student uses an ancient version of WordPerfect, even windoze machine have trouble opening those.

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  2. Anonymous12:16 PM

    I think we should all grab our rosaries and pray for all those things in conflict. I don't understand a word of this stuff, but it sounds pretty bad to me.

    Yes - even worse than the Saturday morning when Mrs F and Ms G were both down to do the flowers on different rotas, and Mac was to blame for that one. Mrs F ended up cutting the string from Ms G's mop!

    I pray that reconciliation will soon show itself on the horizon.

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  3. I'll start with what I was going to say at the end. Google Docs, it's the way forward.

    I'm not a Mac guy but based on my experience with Ubuntu (Linux) and Windows , download the file. Right click on file, properties, open with and chose your word processing program. Save and then double click the file. It should open fine.
    Other than that, sign up for google docs. upload the file to there without doing anything to it and if it uploads ok, check the box next to it and then chose "more actions" then save as appropriate.

    Or if you don't use it, get OpenOffice.org, it'll literally open anything!

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  4. It's interesting, this - my "downloads" window only allows me to see where the doc was sent to and what mail server I was using. (And I only have a one-click mouse pad; it's "control/click" on my mac) I use Google docs, but find few others who do! Nah, I guess I'll either have to open it in Safari or use my POP Mail - also an Apple ap.

    Or I might do what Kenny suggests and resort to prayer ...

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  5. Update: I can open it fine with Text Edit once it's on my desk top, but I had to choose that first. I just didn't think to do this, as files usually just open. Cheers!

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