Re: Received attachment converted from .pdf .xls to winmail.dat?

You say, "they" referring to Microsoft as if everyone at Microsoft knows
everything everyone else does. The MacBU and Windows Office crew are in
separate cities, separate states for the most part. Your assumption that
just because "winmail.dat" files originate with Microsoft that the MacBu
should know how to decode them is about as naïve as thinking that anyone who
lives in New York must know how to get to The Strand bookstore. Microsoft is
too huge.

Mac users for years have found it necessary to give special treatment to
every attachment sent to Windows users, making sure they have visible file
extensions so that Windows will know how to open them. That includes PDF
files and Word documents. Never mind that the file format is easily
recognizable by a computer without its ".pdf" or ".doc" extension (Macs can
do it); Windows insists on the extension and refuses to open the file. It's
a very small thing to ask of a Windows user that he or she make a ONE-TIME
CHANGE so that they send files in HTML format to their Mac friends.

These kind of cross-platform problems will exist in one way or another from
now to the end of time, probably. If it were "fixed" now in Entourage, the
winmail.dat format might change next year. But if the Windows user sets
things up so that that format just does not get sent to their Mac friends,
the problem goes away permanently. In my mind, that's a better solution.

From: Keysaw <kaesau@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage
Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2007 07:21:46 -0700
Subject: Re: Received attachment converted from .pdf .xls to winmail.dat?

On Jun 9, 2:01 am, Diane Ross <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
People come to the newsgroup for help. Telling them to google it is not an
answer. IMHO

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog
<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

If Microsoft would just get the message and fix this problem INSIDE of
Entourage, we wouldn't have to. People have been perplexed by this
same issue for over 5 years and the answer is always to make the
person on the other end change their ways. Microsoft certainly has the
code to do this, they wrote the winmail.dat format.

Keith


.

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