I have recently purchased a new computer running Windows Vista Business Edition. Whenever I open a Microsoft Word email attachment in Word this appears as a mixture of machine language and plain text. How can I get the attachment to display correctly?

When you attempt to open a document and it appears as a mixture of garbage, with some readable text, this indicates that the document is being opened with the wrong application which does not understand how to correctly read and display (render) the file. In this case, it seems that the Word documents may be opening in Notepad (which does not support Word documents) and thus displays incorrectly. Therefore, we need to tell Word documents to open in Microsoft Word so they display correctly.

Start by ensuring that Microsoft Word is installed on the computer. Word does not come standard with Windows Vista, but is a separate product contained in the Microsoft Office suite of programs. The easiest way to verify whether this is installed on your computer is to click the Start button and in the search field type “Word”. You should see search results appear, and if Microsoft Word is installed this will appear in the list of programs. If Word is not installed, you will need to purchase Microsoft Office and install this on your computer before you will be able to properly open Word documents.

However, if you find that Microsoft Word is already installed on the computer, the probable reason that Word documents are not opening correctly is because the file association between Word documents and Microsoft Word has become corrupt. The file association tells Windows that Word documents (i.e. DOC and DOCX files) need to be opened using Microsoft Word. If this file association is missing or corrupt, Windows does not know which program should be used to open the file and makes a best guess, resulting in the file displaying as garbage. To re-establish the file association, save one of the Word file email attachments to your hard drive (rather than attempting to open the file directly from your email client). Locate the file, and then right-click on the file and select “Open With” > “Choose Default Program…”. In the window that appears, select Microsoft Word as the default program then tick “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” and click OK. Now Word documents will always open in Microsoft Word, and you should be able to open Word document attachments from within your email client.