markus said:
Hello,
Situation:
when opening a word document on outlook it opens this document in a
strange preview. This preview shows up with word (not exel) and it
is a different preview to the print preview.
Question:
Is it possible to stop this preview and open each document with the
proper word document window?
Thoughts:
Why does one have the option to save or to open a document and than
it doesn't even open the document properly? It's like opening the
door of a car and than you have to close in order to open the actual
door. What?
You are getting an e-mail with a Word file attached (looks we are
supposed to guess that it is a .doc file). You then attempt to open
that attached file. Rather than save the attachment into a file on
the hard disk, you attempt to open it from the e-mail. It is the
"strange preview" of which you ask when opening the Word doc using
whatever handler was defined to open whatever UNNAMED filetype for the
attached file.
So what happens when you save the attached file to your hard drive and
open it from there? The application used to open that doc file from
the hard disk when you double-click on it in Windows Explorer is the
same handler that is used when you Open the attached file from an
e-mail. The handler program opens that file, not Outlook.
When you Open an attached file from Outlook, something has to be
opened. There is no such thing as a real file being attached to an
e-mail. Attachments are MIME sections within the body of the e-mail
that encode what was the original content of the original file. All
e-mail gets sent as plain text (which is different from the view mode
for e-mails). The attachments are encoded into text and placed in a
MIME section in the body of the email. Outlook is not convenient to
view the raw or original source of an e-mail once it has been added to
Outlook's message store. Other e-mail clients are more convenient in
seeing the raw source of an e-mail where you will see that it all just
text characters. When you Open the attachment from an e-mail (rather
than save it to disk), Outlook has to generate *something* to actually
open, so Outlook creates a file. That file gets created under
<TIF>\OLK*, where <TIF> is the path to your web browser temporary file
cache and OLK* is a subfolder under that path (and has a random set of
character after the "OLK" part in the folder's name). Once Outlook
decodes the MIME part holding the attached file into a file then
Outlook passes it to whatever is the handler for the filetype of that
newly created file. This is just the same as when you double-click on
a file on your hard drive: some handler defined in the registry for
that filetype is used to open that file.
So the "preview" of which you speak when opening an attached file is
whatever program is associated with whatever is the filetype for that
file. If it is a .doc file and if you have Word installed then Word
is the handler that opens that .doc file. If you don't have Word
installed then the WordPad application included with Windows will try
to open the .doc file (but WordPad is obviously not a full-blown
version of Word and may not render the .doc file correctly or with all
the formatting and control that is available in Word). If you don't
have Word (although you do have Outlook) and if you don't want to end
up using WordPad as the handler for .doc files then go download the
Word Viewer from Microsoft's download site. It might better render
..doc files than does WordPad but, again, Word Viewer is just a viewer
application and won't have all the formatting and control features of
Word.
So what happens when you *SAVE* the attached file to your hard drive,
like to a temporary folder, and then double-click on that saved file
using Windows Explorer? What program gets loaded to open that saved
file?
