melissa said:
Most of the downloads are from a Medical Transcription company I work for
at
home. I do have an anti-virus program, ETrust, deleted the anti-spyware
that
was on here thinking it was a problem. By encrypted i mean that it is
opening and saving into my folders with symbols and stuff where it cannot
be
read. I have tried to change it to a readable format when I try to open
the
folder in Microsoft word but it does not ever work. It is stuff like
employee manuals, emails from friends that have attachment sometimes. The
extensions are pdf this time. MOst of the problems come from emails that
I
am saving and they save encrypted so that they are not readable. I
usually
don't get error messages, it just opens in symbols and such and not able
to
be changed to a readable text. Hope that info helps, and I appreciate
your
help.
If they are .PDF files, you need a PDF reader like Acrobat Reader (free) to
display them. Simply changing the extension or forcing an open and resave
in Word will *not* change these in any helpful way, but will likely compound
the problem and you'll need to get another copy of the file.
If you try to open a PDF file in Word, you will get conversion messages
referring to encoding types, and the result is going to be trash, and
seemingly random symbols. This is simply because Word is the wrong
application to read PDFs with.
So, if you're having problems reading PDF files, get and install Acrobat
Reader first, then try with a fresh copy of one of the PDFs.
If they are actually encrypted, as they might well be if they contain
confidential medical information, you need the decryption utility *and* the
passwords. These are not part of Windows and you'd need to contact your
employer.
What you might be describing is not encryption but instead corruption, which
is a very different thing. Or, you may simply have an association issue
where PDF files are associated with Word - and that won't work well.
You can get Acrobat reader here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
HTH
-pk
