Works .wps documents

[Guest]

We purchased a new Toshiba laptop a few months ago. It came with MS Works 8.5
and no MS Word program. We created a text document using Works Word Processor
which resulted in a file with a .wps extension. We encountered two problems.
First, we sent this document to someone as an email attachment and they were
unable to open it. Second, when we clicked on the email attachment ourselves
we got an error message, "Works cannot open the file you selected. The file
may be corrupted or it may be a file type that the spreadsheet cannot
open.............."

Why is Works unable to open a document created in the Works Word Processor?
And, is there a way to have text documents created in this Works Word
processor automatically saved as a .doc, or at least some file type that
other people can open and we can open?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Three issues here:

1. Word should be able to open Works documents, provided that the
appropriate Works filter is installed; however Works can save in Word
compatible (RTF) format.
2. It is bad practice to open attachments directly from e-mail messages.
Copy to the hard drive first.
3. It appears that this document has probably been corrupted in transit -
maybe because you attached it to an e-mail message while it was still loaded
in Works. Zip the file and try again. You will need some ZIP software to do
this. There are free ones that you can download, and there is the excellent
WinRAR.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

Graham:
I saved the Works document to My Documents as an rtf file, as you suggested.
Then sent this rtf document as an attachment in an Outlook Express email.
Opened the email, when received, clicked on the attachment, and tried to open
it; got the following message:
"Microsoft Office Word
The command cannot be performed because a dialog box is open. Click OK, and
then close open dialog boxes to continue."

I am not sure what a "dialog box" is, but the only program I had opened was
Outlook Express. Obviously there are programs running in the background, but
I have not opened any program other than Outlook Express. Also tried saving
the attachment to My Documents and then opening it; same message.
Don

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Don't try to open the attachment directly. Save it to your HD and open it
from there.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

None of what has been suggested solves the problem. Again, a document was
created using Works 8.5 and then saved to My Documents as a .wps file. If you
then try to open this file from My Documents you get an error message "Works
cannot open the file you selected. The file may be corrupted or it may be a
file type that the spreadsheet cannot open". If I send this same file as an
attachment in an Outlook Express email to my other computer, I can open the
document with Word 2002. But, again, you cannot open the document on the
computer it was created on?????

Further, following a suggestion, I saved this same file to My Documents as
an .rtf file. If I try to open this file from My Documents, I get an error
message " The command cannot be performed because a dialog box is open...."

Any ideas?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think the difference may be in whether you double-click the file in
Windows Explorer or open it through Word. There are several possibilities
for what will happen here:

1. The file is saved in Works format, with a Works icon, and the file
association is correct. Works 8.5 is installed on the computer. If you
double-click on the file in Windows Explorer, it should be opened by Works
(any error messages you receive would then be a Works problem).

2. Same situation as (1), but the file association is incorrect. Windows may
not know what program to use to open the file. You will have to right-click,
choose Open With, and select an application (you could select either Works
or Word, if Word is installed).

3. Same situation as (1), but Works is not installed. Again, Windows won't
know what to do, since the program associated with the file (Works) is not
available. Again, you'd have to choose Open With and select an application
(in this case, it would have to be Word).

In none of the above situations would Word be used to open the document,
whereas, if you open the file from within Word, it will be opened or not
depending on whether Word has the appropriate converters installed.

If you want Windows always to use Word to open Works documents, then you
need to change the file association. The easiest way to do this is to choose
Word for Open With and check (or leave checked) the box for "Always use this
program to open files of this type" (or whatever the wording is).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.