Mail sees DOCX attachment as PDF

I am running Acrobat 9 and Office Suite 2010 on Windows 7 using Parallels on an iMac running under OS X 10.7.5. I had problems with PDF page size and tried many things to fix without success. However, I now find that if I attach a Word file to an e-mail message in Mail, the icon for the attachment is that for a PDF file, not a Word icon. If I double click on the file, the system opens the file in Word but immediately converts it to a PDF document. This only applies to a Word file DOCX extension, not any older file with a DOC extension. I have restored the Windows system back to the system prior to this episode but to no effect. Clearly Mail is recognising a DOCX file as if it has the attributes of a PDF file. But it changes those attributes so that other MAC OS applications such as Finder then see the file as a PDF file. This does not happen under Windows. If I double click on such a file in Windows Explorer, it opens normally in Word.

I would be grateful for advice on how to change Mail's recognition of a DOCX file back to a Word file.

Go into Office Preferences and change the default saving from .docx to .doc. When .docx was introduced it was necessary to use a converter with Windows and older Mac OS X operating systems.. From memory it was Open XML.

Thanks for your suggestion, Harryb, but that seems to be a quickfix solution for new files using the Word system rather than solve the problem with Mail. And it won't work for old files. I assumed that there would be some way looking at the Preferences for Mail to solve the problem there. But there is no feature in Mail Preferences that is relevant to this issue and, since I am relatively new to Macs, am not sure how to approach the problem. It is as if the system has changed the "Open With" feature for DOCX files to Acrobat but is only doing this for Mail.

If you change Office Preferences it will remain at .doc so you can email them. I have mine at .doc all the time. Lot of users, especially Windows, are not aware of the XML converter.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=27334

I think I have solved it. I right-clicked a DOCX file, selected GET INFO, under OPEN WITH selected WORD then clicked CHANGED ALL. After this, all the DOCX files I attached to MAIL messages appear correctly with the WORD icon.

Returning to your suggestion, however, if I change the extension to DOC in the options, will this retain WORD 2010 features that are not present in WORD 2003-2007?

Returning to your suggestion, however, if I change the extension to DOC in the options, will this retain WORD 2010 features that are not present in WORD 2003-2007?

Click to expand...

No it will not. You corrected the problem as stated in your reply, leave it that way. BTW, Windows folks who still use Office 2003 can download the MS converter for free. Office 2007 already has it built in. (I have Office 2003, 2007, and 2010.)