I have a friend that I’m trying to send a Word document to. She has an iMac and uses Hotmail and I’ve determined that she doesn’t know how to use either.
I believe that Macs can open RTF documents. If I convert the Word doc to RTF, should she be able to read it?
In Windows we can create folders using Windows Explorer. How are folders created using a Mac?
How do you download a file using Hotmail?
Would appreciate some basic instructions that I can pass on to her.
Thanks!
Macs can only open .rtf files if they have applications, such as MS Word, that can read .rtf files.
If your friend doesn’t have such a program, tell her to go to http://www.icword.com and download the demo of the icWord program. This program allows you to open and save in another format Word and other format files.
a) If your friend has a modern version of Word, it should open the Word document you are sending her. (I am assuming that Hotmail allows file attachments, and provides a means of downloading them. I have never used Hotmail and have a very very low opinion of them for unrelated reasons). Word is cross-platform
b) If your friend has a not-so-modern version of Word, or virtually ANY other word processor known to Mac-dom, it should be able to translate a Word document you send her if you use the Save As feature and save it as a very old version of Word, say, for example, Word version 4.0 for Macintosh. All modern PC versions of Word can do that, I’m pretty sure.
c) If your friend doesn’t HAVE A WORD PROCESSOR, or has an extremely primitive one that can’t translate any version of Word whatsoever, you can print to PDF (assuming you have Adobe Acrobat or a freeware/shareware mechanism like GhostScript that will let you print to PDF) and email her the PDF, or even put it up on your web site and send her the link. Of course, if she doesn’t have a friggin’ word processor, she may not have Acrobat Reader either.
d) You can, as you suggest, send it as RTF, but if her word processor can’t interpret a Word 4 document it may also be unable to interpret an RTF document.
e) You could copy the document’s contents and paste it into the email message itself. She may end up viewing it without formatting, as plain text, but she would at least be guaranteed to receive it.
If your Word document contains pasted graphics, stick with options a or c, as other options may lose the images. If your document contains tables, avoid only option e, the others will preserve tables even if they lose graphics. If your document contains no formatting other than bold, italic, centered versus noncentered text, indented tabs, etc, you might give serious consideraton to option e, unless she needs to see it as you see it, aesthetically. If she needs to see it as you see it, use option c, even in preference to option a, as nothing is as WYSISYG as a PDF file.
Her iMac came with Appleworks installed. Appleworks can read RTF files…as well as several versions of Word files. I don’t think this will be a problem.
I guess a bit of clarification is in order. My iMac has AppleWorks installed as well, and it couldn’t open the .rtf file. However, I’m using version 5; RTF translators were added to AppleWorks in version 6.0.3. So if straykat23’s friend is using any version earlier than that, she won’t be able to open the .rtf file.
You can create folders right on your Mac’s desktop or in another folder. You also have the option of creating a new folder when you save a file.
To create a folder on the desktop or in another folder, choose File > New Folder (that’s Command-N for you keyboard shortcut junkies).
To create a new folder when saving a file, just click the “New (folder icon)” button that should be there somewhere in the Save dialog box.
I’ve never used Hotmail, so I can’t help you there. Sorry 'bout that.