I’m sure most of you have come across a situation where a student e-mails an assignment to you as an attachment, yet you are unable to open it.  As long as the student created the document using Microsoft Word, you shouldn’t have a problem, even if the student has used the most recent version of Word.  You see, your computer should have a Word converter that automatically converts Word 2007 files to an earlier version of Word that can be read by your computer.  

However, under certain conditions, this conversion doesn’t happen as seemlessly as it should.  Perhaps the file looks something like the image at the bottom of this post.  In this instance, your machine doesn’t know what program created the file.  For whatever reason, there is no file extension associated with the file; therefore, you need to give it a file extension (.doc) by renaming the file.  This is much, much easier than it sounds. To see how it’s done, view this video tutorial.

It’s important to note that renaming the file with .doc will only work if it was created with Word.  For example, if a student created the file using WordPerfect or an Apple product, like Pages, adding this file extension will do you no good.