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Email attachments are encoded incorrectly?

I am having the reverse of the typical winmail dat problem. I have a mac with microsoft office installed. I am sending an excel template to windows users. The template was dropped/dragged (from my old windows computer) to my excel for mac. When the file is sent to any windows user they receive a winmail dat file. When I send it to myself it works fine. I want to be able to alter the file before sending so the very busy and not highly technical recipients can receive my emails. Hope you find this interesting and even better, find a solution.

Dave's Answer:

If you have a Mac with Microsoft Office installed, I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that you're using Entourage, a part of the Mac Office suite, for your email. That being the case, it turns out that there are some important preferences that you probably need to adjust to sidestep your reported problem:

You'll want to launch Entourage, then go to the Entourage menu item and choose Preferences, then click on Compose. Here's what you'll see:

Microsoft Entourage for Mac: Compose preferences

The key value here is to ensure that you've selected Windows as the "Encode for" preference, as I have in my configuration. It's yet another area where us Mac users have to tweak things to meet the needs of our, um, platform-challenged Windows colleagues. :-)

I think that'll fix your problem. If you're running Apple Mail or a similar application, there are equivalent configuration settings, again, just dig around in the Preferences a bit.

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Comments

Thank you so much for this! It was driving me out of my mind! I was saving from Photoshop into TIF or JPG then opening ImageReady and saving as a PNG - and that was the only way to make it work!

You are a life saver!

m i k e

Posted by: Mike Bromberg at April 2, 2008 2:12 PM

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Now a subscriber!

Thanks a million!

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