I've recently bought a DELL for my grandparents to surf the net and use e-mail, I figure it would be simple for them to use. Unfortunately, as all new computers are preloaded with Vista, I have no choice but to use it.
My problem is this, 50% of all e-mails my grandfather reads are those cheesy powerpoint slideshows set to music that his friends and family send to him. Try as I might, I cannot get him to remember the steps neccessary to save an attachment to the harddrive so he can open it it, he needs to open the attachment right from the paperclip in Microsoft Mail (the Vista replacement for Outlook).
Long story short, the system comes with MS Office Powerpoint Viewer which lets you view but not edit/create PPTs. The problem is that whenever you click on a .ppt file (open attachment) the system claims that file association is not setup and to do so in the control panel. I of course, have set up the file association, I've even tried to save the file to the harddrive and told Windows to remember to open the file everytime with the PPT Viewer. The association works when you save the file to your drive, it does not work (just comes up with the error that there is no program associated with the program, gives you no options to choose a program) when you try to open it as an attachment inside Microsoft Mail.
Any ideas what I can do? I don't want to go out and buy a $300 MS Office package only so that my grandparents can click on an attachment and have it execute properly, and they are giving me a hard time about this ("in the old computer I could do this and that, new stuff is broken, etc.")
This is something that's definetely a Microsoft bug that needs to be fixed, where do I even go to report it? I am afraid to touch the labyrinthine bureucracy that is Microsoft support.
|