I have just encountered a situation I have never encountered in my life (at home or at the workplace). I wondered if the collective wisdom of the group could assist.
I received a 1997-2003 Word file as an email attachment. It would not open with an error message about trying to retrieve the file. I saved the file and looked at the properties. Some of the content had been blocked because it came from another computer. There was a tick-box to unblock. After doing this the Word file then opened successfully.
I am using Word 365. There is nothing unusual about the file - no macros, no images, text only. Nearly all files come from another computer. Do I - or maybe the sender - have a rogue security setting?
Thanks very much. I'm beginning to understand (and I will certainly know what to do in future. My puzzlement is (1) surely all files are downloaded from the net in one way or another unless you write them to a memory stick and (2) this was an estate agent which must be sending Word files to clients all the time, and it does not seem to have happened before, and they did not know what to do.
Files downloads by things like browsers, are "marked" by Alternate Streams.
On the Macintosh computer, long ago, they had "Resource Fork" and "Data Fork". That is a kind of alternate stream implementation, limited to just two streams.
Microsoft sought to have a similar capability in their new file system, so that was added to NTFS.
formatting link
First we try a local file I created as a Notepad test.
No streams are found, so nothing is listed. The file will behave, whether opened with Office or with Notepad.
Now, I try a file which is downloaded from the Internet. The ZIP file containing the Streams.exe program :-) Streams64 is just the 64 bit version of the program. You should be able to use either version, on a 64 bit system.
C:\Users\myname\Downloads\Streams.zip: stream number 1 :Zone.Identifier:$DATA 26 stream number 2
Now, let us open the alternate stream (which we know is text) and look at it for fun. The "thing" after the colon, is the stream name we just discovered. Notice that the file has two streams - the first stream is a ZIP file, the second stream is TEXT.
PS> notepad streams.zip:Zone.Identifier
The contents of Notepad show...
[ZoneTransfer] ZoneId=3 <=== There are five zones in Internet Explorer <=== Zone3 is Internet Zone, equals "Malware Danger"
When you use the unblock tick box, that removed the alternate stream completely. Similar to how the streams.exe utility could do it. A file could have even more streams (added by the user), and those streams would not be removed by ticking "Unblock".
Oddly, saving a file to a memory stick will probably cause windows to lose the information about it being a downloaded file. (the marker is stored in an alternate data stream of the file - but alternate streams can only exist (in windows) on files under NTFS - so copying it to a FAT or FAT32 formatted volume like that typical on thumb drives will lose the extra stream(s))
Word also has user selectable security settings to tell it how to open older version of word files. You may need to change those to open versions saved from Wood 2007 or older.
In Word got to the file tab on the ribbon, choose options. Then Trust Center from the list of word options. Then click the "Trust Center Settings..." button. Finally select "File Block Settings"
That is different - it is just listing the files types that Outlook will whinge about if you try to attach them to an email. Basically stuff that could harm a recipient in the habit of double clicking on attachments without thinking!
(you can of course zip them first and then attach)
No, it could be that perhaps it was a form. There you do not want people messing with the formatting. I've seen what you describe too, often I tend to use Libra Office and being able to manipulate documents quite well its seldom an issue. I am not buying into the rent your office suite. I suggest this is why so many people use Libra these days. I still have an old format version of Word here with docx conversion routine, and although you cannot preserve the new format, you can load them and of course being older it loads the doc files as they were intended. Brian
Thank you, Brian. This is my thinking too now. The sender was using a Word 97-2003 file - on a laptop I think - sent via his office IT system. It was either an ancient template or a previous file amended. I think he should use the latest format compatible with his office IT (and probably most of his clients). Can I charge a consultancy fee :-)
Well quite possibly :-) Anything older than Office 2016 is no longer supported by MS anyway.
It would generally be better to send out docs by PDF rather than in a work doc.
(some places have a policy of saving in older formats rather than the native format of the current version, to maintain backward compatibility and not cause problems for people with old versions. However sometimes that can make it harder rather than easier).
UPDATE - I have now discovered there is a setting that can be changed in the Trust Center.
(In Word): - Click file>options - Click Trust Center>Trust Center Settings - Click Protected View - Uncheck the following boxes; Enable Protected View for Files originating from the Internet. Enable Protected View for Files located in potentially unsafe locations. Enable Protected View for Outlook attachments.
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