Can’t open attachment in Outlook Express

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An elderly lady friend using Outlook Express receive an attachment titled something like “attachment.pps (360K)”, but when trying to open it the error message said that there was no associated program. However, when I copied to her desktop it opened just fine with Power Point Viewer. What’s going on here?

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Perhaps the Power Point Viewer does not have a plugin to allow it to open in OE. See if this page shows how to open these files.

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Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

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Un-checking the “Do not allow attachments” box doesn’t fix the problem. Any other suggestions?

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This is such an old arrangement, it is possible Power Point Viewer will not work with OE. I do not have any other suggestions at this time.

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The way the Power Point Viewer works is that you have to open the viewer then browse to the file and open it with the viewer. The viewer is simply that…..a viewer. It does not put any entries into the registry. Therefore, the viewer has to be opened and then the “*.pps” can be opened.

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Have you tried uninstalling and reinstall the Viewer?

Joe

--Joe

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I’ll give that one a try.

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This may help: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/ppsopen.htm

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An elderly lady friend using Outlook Express receive an attachment titled something like “attachment.pps (360K)”, but when trying to open it the error message said that there was no associated program. However, when I copied to her desktop it opened just fine with Power Point Viewer. What’s going on here?

This is a common problem and the solution is to edit the registry or run the fix program.
PPSFix (v2.1) for Windows XP
Copyright © 2008 Ramesh Srinivasan
Website: http://windowsxp.mvps.org

To edit the registry yourself:
1. Click Start, type regedit.exe and press ENTER
2. Navigate to the following branch:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT PowerPointViewer.SlideShow.11 shell Show
3. Right-click Show and click Rename
4. Type the word Open so that Show is replaced by Open
5. If you have PowerPoint Viewer 2007 installed, repeat the above steps in this key, as well:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT PowerPointViewer.SlideShow.12 shell Show
6. After changing Show to Open, close Registry Editor window.
For .PPT files (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation)
1. Click Start, type regedit.exe and press ENTER
2. Navigate to the following branch:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT PowerPointViewer.Show.11 shell Show
3. Right-click Show and click Rename
4. Type the word Open so that Show is replaced by Open command
5. If you have PowerPoint Viewer 2007 installed, repeat the above steps in this key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT PowerPointViewer.Show.12 shell Show
6. After changing Show to Open, close Registry Editor window.

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Thanks. I’ll give it a try.

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PPSFix did it! Thanks.

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Sorry to bump an oldish thread, but there was a similar problem with Windows Live Mail and Word documents. The fix is here.

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The error message I get is “there was a problem sending a command to the program.” I tried the above solution (docfix) but it didn’t work for me. Any idea what could be wrong? This is affecting my work because I can’t open attached word .doc or .docx that people send me. Am using Windows 7 Home, Windows Lilve Mail 2011, Woprd 2003 (which I prefer to the later versions). I downloaded microsoft’s converter that allows .docx to open easily in Word. What should happen is: I click the mail attachment. It opens Word and I can see and use the document. Or, it opens Word which instantly converts the docx to doc and opens the document. What happens instead is that I get the error message and then Word opens but the document doesn’t. Any ideas?

Kelliann

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