If I purchase office home and student will I be able to open emails/attachments and documents that are in word and pdf files? I have a desk top and can not open any attachments sent to me.

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:33:49 +0000, mrsbobalu wrote: If I purchase office home and student will I be able to open emails/attachments and documents that are in word and pdf files? I have a desk top and can not open any attachments sent to me. To open a file (whether you get it as an attachment or in any other way) you need to have an appropriate program installed for it (either the program that created the file or some compatible program). So whether you can open attachments depends on what kind of files (the extension, the characters after the dot at the end of the file name) the attachments are. If you get .doc or .docx files, these were created by Microsoft Word (or a compatible program) and to open them you need Word, or a compatible program. Microsoft Office Home and Student includes Word, or you could use OpenOffice (a free program that is largely compatible with Microsoft Office), WordPerfect, etc. Or you could download and install the free Microsoft Word Viewer at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3657ce88-7cfa-457a-9aec-f4f827f20cac&displaylang=en or http://tinyurl.com/2w3s6z The viewer will let you read existing files, but not create or modify them. To open .pdf files, you need a pdf viewer, and Microsoft Office Home and Student won't help you. The standard pdf viewer that most people use is Adobe Reader, and you can download that for free from http://get.adobe.com/reader/ However, despite Adobe Reader's being standard, I greatly prefer the Foxit Reader (also free), which you can download from http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ I think it's much better and much faster. You mentioned only Word and pdf files, so those are what I addressed above. If you get other kinds of attachments, you may need other software, so please tell us what kinds of files they are. And one remaining point: opening attachments can be very risky. You often see advice not to open attachments from people you don't know. I think that that's one of the most dangerous pieces of advice you see around, because it implies that it's safe to do the opposite--open attachments from friends and relatives. But many viruses spread by sending themselves to everyone in the infected party's address book, so attachments received from friends are perhaps the most risky to open. Even if the attachment legitimately comes from a friend, it can contain a virus. I'm not suggesting that a friend is likely to send you a virus on purpose, but if the friend is infected without realizing it, any attachment he sends you is likely to also be infected. Ken Blake

Hi, Please refer to the information which Ken posted. If there are any questions, as this is Windows 7 Forum while this issue is more related to Microsoft Office, in order to get the answer effectively, it is recommended to submit a new question in Microsoft Office Forum. Regards, Sabrina Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.