Playing nice with Windows, episode 1: Extensions

Greetings, friend! Looks like this is your first time here. As such, we encourage you to subscribe to our site via RSS feed or by email so you can get updates as they happen. Thanks for stopping by!

Part four - Fixing it after the fact (in which we make the Windows users feel warm and fuzzy…)
It’s bound to happen that you will receive an email from someone that contains an attachment with no extension. But don’t worry…fixing it is easy, like Sunday morning (hello? is this thing on?).

In your email program, highlight the attached file, then right (or secondary) click it. You should see a menu item named ‘Save As…’

In the ‘Save as…’ dialog, you can choose a location, but more importantly, you can RENAME the file! Aha! If you know, for instance, that a file is a spreadsheet, you can append the extension ‘.xls’ manually (as seen below).

Save the file to a familiar location (My Documents or Desktop, for instance).

But, in the event that you forget to name the file or it has already been saved somewhere also sans extension, you can still fix it.

First, go to the location you saved the file to. You should then see it sitting there, all lonely and extension-less. Here’s how to make it feel loved:

Gently click the files’ icon with your left (or primary) mouse button (you can also highlight the file and hit F2 on your keyboard).

The text of the file should highlight, making the field editable.

At the end of the filename, type in the extension, preceded with a period, like so: ‘.xls’.

Click outside of the file, and you’ll see it now has a new name and a shiny new icon. If you double-click it, it should open up in the appropriate program. Tada! Sorcery at its finest.

Pages in this post: 1 2 3 4 5