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.
January 4th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
It’s crazy how such a small problem could have plagued me for so long. I chalked it up to the fact that so many different pieces of technology were involved (printer/scanner, Mac, my PC, clients’ PCs, iPhone, Entourage, Gmail, etc). Thank you again for taking the time to focus on my dilemma. If you hadn’t said you had a feeling Entourage must be the culprit it could have taken me much longer to figure it out. I had posted the problem on Apple’s site yesterday but the only reply I got was so off base, it would sent me in the wrong direction for who-knows-how-long. As for the posting on HP’s site, I got no replies. Maybe I’m asking for too quick a response (1-2 days turnaround) but that’s so normal on Twitter it’s what you come to expect, especially when your business is being severely disrupted. Anyway, I can honestly say that I have made some fantastic contacts through Twitter. Not only is this crazy PDF nightmare over but I have also made some terrific friends and closed several pieces of business in 2009 just from hanging out and talking to people I like!
January 4th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
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