What's causing this file name extension problem with Open Office?

Ok, so do you have the email open? Good. Save the second file – the one you can’t open – and if it doesn’t have .doc, go to the file and type that in. Then it should open as a doc.

@MyNewtBoobs Just to clarify, I can open the docs on my end, but my recipients can’t. Is there a way I can change it before I send the email?

@augustlan Oh. Can they open them in Google Docs?

I’m not sure, and some of them probably have no clue about Google Docs, either. It’s something I’d really like to fix before they get it.

Is the problem in the file, or the attachment?

I’m not really sure. In my documents folder, it shows that I’ve saved it correctly. I can’t see any difference between the document she was able to open, and the one she couldn’t, from within Open Office. As soon as I attach it to an email though, the trouble shows up. So maybe it’s a Gmail issue, but I doubt it.

@augustlan But it’s just an issue on her end, right? You can do everything correctly?

Correct. But if I send it to myself as an email attachment, then I can’t open it.

You may have tried some of this, but just exploring possibilities…

> zip the file and send it to yourself, sometimes mail servers do strange things dependent on the file extension, wrapping it in a zip should keep that from being a factor
> the browser might have cached the file, start a new browser session (just close and reopen the browser, I don’t think this should happen, but it takes 15 seconds so might as well try)
> open and resave the file as a .doc file again, might just have gotten crossed up
> Try resaving the file as another format (rtf maybe) and send that to yourself. It will let you know if it’s just goofiness with word formatting.
> make sure you’re saving it and then opening it when you send it to yourself (as opposed to “running” it from the browser

Goofiness all around, I hope it helps.

@funkdaddy Success! After trying everything (I’d already resaved it as a .doc several times, with no luck), I saved it as an .rtf. That attached just fine, but still wasn’t ideal for my purposes. I went back into the newly saved .rtf, and resaved it as a .doc, attached it to a new email, and it worked! I have no idea why it worked, but hey! I’ll take it. Thank you so much. <3

What is your operating system? I’m not sure why there was no extension, but I do know that Windows has (had) problems with recognizing files without extensions, which might explain why you have no problems opening it.

Anyway, I do believe that if you manually type .doc at the end of the file name when you save it, OpenOffice automatically makes it a Word 97 file, with the extension in place.

@Vincentt I’m on an ancient machine, running Windows XP. I did try to manually type in .doc at the end of the file name, but that didn’t work, either. I still don’t know what causes this problem (and why so randomly?), but at least I have a work-around for it, now.

True, but the .rtf format isn’t ideal – I believe it doesn’t support many more complex document structures. If you have problems like that, you could always try to save it as an OpenDocument file which I believe even recent versions of Microsoft Office can open. Or, if they don’t need to edit the document, sending a PDF works too.