[Solved] Certain files greyed out and cannot be opened when emailed

[bluecaboose]

I have W11. Email is through Thunderbird. For years I have been able to attach documents saved in .odf and .doc formats to my emails. Just recently, for no reason I can fathom, recipients cannot open the .doc attachments even though they use MS Word programs. In my folders the .odf file names are as usual but the .doc file names are now greyed out. I could not open them either. That problem is corrected, however, the email recipients cannot. Originally I suspected Carbonite Webroot. That proved not to be the case after uninstalling that program and rebooting. .doc files were still greyed out. Reinstalled the Carbonite Webroot program with no change to the .doc files appearance. I do not knowingly use any for of Cloud storage aside from those in the Carbonite Webroot programs. I need to send these .doc files frequently but none of the recipients can open them. My computer skills are limited so please keep that in mind when offering solutions. Any ideas?

[floris v]

Welcome to the forum. Your question is a bit vague. We are a forum for support of OpenOffice and you don't mention it at all. But anyway, it seems that MS Word no longer opens files in the - ancient - .doc format because those files aren't considered as safe anymore. So, if you have to send files by mail or other means to users of MS Word, you will have to send them in the .docx format, which is not (yet) supported by Apache OpenOffice, but it is supported by LibreOffice. So, if you are still working with OpenOffice and you have to share work with users of MS Office, now is the time to get LibreOffice. It's very similar to OpenOffice, by the way.

[RoryOF]

Also, emailed files need to be Saved to the local hard drive so that they are stand-alone, not in the bowels of the email program.

[bluecaboose]

Thanks. I found saving the document as a PDF file allows it to be attached, sent to, and opened by MS Word users.

[RoryOF]

MS Word is supposed to open .odt files, albeit with some slight feature failures.