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Q: I have a Dell computer running Vista Home Premium and use Windows Mail recommended by Cox .  I can’t open a .doc attachment in Windows Mail. I have to save the attachment to my desk top and then it will open.  I can open .docx attachments when in Windows mail.  I have gone to the control panel and set .doc files to open with Microsoft Office Word.  Can you point me in the right direction? 

– Charles B.
Fort Walton Beach, Fla

A: I covered a similar issue relating to an inability to open PowerPoint (.ppt) files from within Outlook in the column that published on May 23 of this year.  When I wrote that column, I was under the impression that this problem was limited to PowerPoint, but apparently not!  Well, let’s delve deeper into extensions, and how they are associated with applications.

You are on the right track looking at file associations, because this is the one and only place in Windows where a file extension such as .doc or .docx is connected to a program.  However, Windows defines multiple ACTIONS within each association, and obviously mail programs, particularly Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Mail, are trying to use actions which, for whatever reason, do not get properly set up on some computers.  In your case, I would bet that when you double-click a file that you have saved on the desktop, Windows runs the “Open” action.  But when you double-click it from within your mail program, it’s probably incorrectly trying to run an “Edit” action instead.  The difference?  Not much.  On the computer upon which I’m writing this, Open and Edit are identically defined.  But both do exist, and MY documents open just fine from within my mail program.  On yours, the Edit action may not exist for .doc files.

To get where you can check if the proper action exists, and create a new one if it doesn’t, perform the following steps: Bring up Windows Explorer.  Open one of your local hard drives, such as the C: drive.  From the “Tools” menu, select “Folder Options”, and click over to the “File Types” tab.  The list is in alphabetical order, so scroll down to the entry for “DOC”.  Highlight it, and click “Advanced”.  All the actions are listed there.  The default one that is executed when you simply double-click the file is shown in bold.  If an “Edit” action is not present in the list, you need to add one.  First, highlight the “Open” action, and click the “Edit…” button.  Either make a screen shot of the dialog, or carefully write down ALL the text that goes in the fields.  Then click “Cancel” and click “New…”  fill-in all the blanks with the data you captured above, and click “Ok” to save your newly created action.  If this was indeed the problem, your .DOC files should now open properly, even from within e-mail.

So, why all the actions?  Well, these actions appear as commands on the shortcut menu for all files with the extension you’re viewing.  That means you can run a particular action by highlighting a file, right-clicking it, and choosing the corresponding command from the menu.  This is especially handy if you are handling files with a common extension in groups.  For example, you can select a bunch of Word documents, right-click them, and from the context menu choose “Print”.  Windows will systematically open each document and send it to the default printer for you.  If you do this, make sure all your default settings are the way you want them, because there’s no way to stop a batch action like this once you’ve started it.