Message In Office

[hardy49]

I have been sent a message containing an attachment but I am unable to read it because it is in Office. Is there any way I can access it without having to purchase Office

[Canary42]

I expect Buenchico will be along sometime with a more comprehensive answer [excuse my presumption Chris] but, as far as I know, most decent word processing software allow you to open "alien" files as unformatted text or similar, from which you can usually pick out the essence of it.

[Guilbert53]

An attachment cant be in "Office" as Office (I assume Microsoft Office) is a whole suite of products.

I could be a word processing file, a spreadsheet file, a presentation file and so on.

Download it from your email system to your computer then try to find out what type of file it is.

In Windows you should be able to "hover" your mouse over the file name and it will say what type of file it is.

If it is a word processing file or a spreadsheet it should be easy to find a program to open it (there are plenty of free ones on the web).

[Guilbert53]

Note if it is a word processing file then ask the person who sent it to you to convert it to a PDF file (this is easy to do).

Then you can download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader product (or similar product) to read the PDF file.

This assumes you dont plan to change the file but just view it.

[Old_Geezer]

Microsoft have viewers which I believe are free to download. Try a websesrch.

[Old_Geezer]

Alternatively I believe the freeware suites tend to support MS document standards: at least at opening.

[Buenchico]

As has been said, a file can't be 'in Office'. Check the file extension to see what type of file it is. (.doc, .docx, .xls, .accdb, etc). Then look in the list here to see which Microsoft Office program is needed to open it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Office_filename_extensions

The vast majority of those files can be opened by free software, such as OpenOffice
https://www.openoffice.org/
but just ask us if you need help with a specific file type.