Receiving Attachments from Apple Computers on a Windows Machine (unable to open)

Have you ever had the problem that you receive a file attachment via email and it is an unknown format, and you have no program with which to open it?

This can happen with an Apple user sending a file to a Windows users and the file extension is a .dat file, which cannot be opened by Windows. Well it is not as problematic as it may at first seem. For files that you know from the sender are files with common extensions such as a word processing file (.doc) or a spreadsheet (.xls), see the example below.

In our example there is a file called UNKNOWN FILE.

All that needs to be done is to right-click over the file in question, select RENAME.

In our case we renamed it as follows KNOWN FILE.Doc.

The important part is to add the extension of the file when renaming it. As can be seen from the picture, the icon has changed into a Word Icon and can now be opened in Microsoft Word.