When I receive e-mails with attachments I have no problems if they are sent in Word 6 (.DOC) format. However, if they are sent in RTF or any other format the attachment is displayed in the form of a series of squares and oblongs! Is there any way to fix this as I can’t always ask the sender to resend the attachment in Word 6 format? My computer is a HP Pavilion running Windows 95 with Outlook Express 5.

Word 6 has the internal ability to import and export documents which are in Rich Text Format (RTF) format. You can find a full list of all supported file formats for Word 6 at support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q104/9/49.asp. So let’s work with the RTF files as an example of how to fix the problem. More than likely, the reason that the RTF files are appearing with garbage are because they are opening in a program which does not support RTF format (eg. Notepad). To get around this, firstly, save the RTF file to your hard drive in a location that you can remember (eg. the desktop). Open Word 6, go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Open’ and go to the location where you saved the file. In the ‘File Type’ drop down box, select ‘Rich Text Format (*.rtf)’ or alike. You should now be able to see the RTF file and open it like any other file. You can do this for any other file type that is supported by Word 6. However, an easier way, is to set Windows so when you double-click on any RTF file, it will automatically open through Word. This also means that you can open the RTF file through Outlook Express without having to manually save it to the hard drive first. To do this, use Windows Explorer to navigate to the folder in which you placed the previously saved RTF file. Now, hold down the shift key and right-click on the file. In the menu that appears, click ‘Open With…’. In the ‘Open With’ window which appears, click to highlight ‘Word 6′ (or alike) in the ‘Choose the program you want to use’ scroll box and then tick the box labelled ‘Always use this program to open these files’. Click the ‘Ok’ button. Now, every time you double-click on a RTF file, it should open in Word 6.