I blame Microsoft…sort of.
Late last night I was sent a tweet from @CalgaryRealtor – Jim Sparrow, asking for some help for a colleague of his, @jolenta with a Mac related issue. Jim knows that I’ve got nothing but Mac’s at home, and no doubt with my Mac OS X – Snow Leopard upgrade post recently there’s definitely a clue there that I own one.
To make a long story short, it turns out the issue was that whenever a PDF was forwarded to any of Jolenta’s clients or colleagues on a Windows machine, the PDF was corrupt and un-viewable. Well it turned out that Entourage was the culprit.
I’m working on getting a screen shot of the setting (since I don’t run Entourage as my email client) so that you can see the fix. Essentially if you’re running into the issue where you send a file attached to your email in Microsoft Entourage on Mac (obviously since it’s not available on that Windows system) and only Mac users can open it:
- You’ve picked the right users to have as friends and should encourage those with problems to make the switch
- You need to go into the Entourage preferences and adjust the attachment settings from “Mac (Binhex)” to “Any Computer (AppleDouble)”
I see this as a great example of just helping people out and what good the internet has given to the world. I’ve never met Jolenta, nor Jim, yet I made sure that the problem was solved because of trusted communications we’ve had online—in a virtual world essentially.
Have you helped anyone you’ve never met? I’ve even had clients that I’d never met. The world just keeps getting smaller.