Practicing the Black Art (06/01)
Open with... what?
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
One day, you open your email and you see you have a note from a good friend that says, "You've got to see this! It's just too cool." Hmm, he must be referring to the attachment. You eagerly transfer the file to a folder on your hard drive . You open the folder and see the generic Windows icon along with DIGITALDJ.WMZ, which is the file name.
Flushed with anticipation, you click on it with your mouse and then (groan ) you get the Open With dialog box. Open with what? What do you do from here?
To proceed you need to understand what the Open With dialog box is telling you and what it's asking for. It has to do with something called a file association. The items you see in the list are programs that are installed on your PC. Let's leave DIGITALDJ.WMZ alone for now and examine some things that will help you understand what's going on.
Imagine you are meeting a complete stranger for the very first time. You strike up a conversation saying, "Hi, what's your name"? The person may respond with something like "Hello, I'm Susan Brown". You now know as much about that person as you do about the mysterious DIGITALDJ.WMZ. Susan is a member of the Brown family and DIGITALDJ is a member of the WMZ family.
Every file has a filename and must be named according to certain rules or conventions. Files are named in a way that loosely resembles the way we name people in our culture. Files have a "first" name and a "last" name. The structure, or syntax, is filename followed by a period and ending with an extension of either three or four characters. You can use any combination of alpha and numeric characters, including spaces, for your file names. The file name is then followed by a period, which acts as a separator, and ends with either a three or four character extension.
File names, including period and extension, can contain up to 255 characters. Because of internal system requirements, (things that go on under the covers) you shouldn't use certain symbols in file names. Avoid characters that don't appear on your keyboard. Don't use the, trademark, copyright, or other symbols. Never use "* ? / \ and avoid the characters that require you to press shift and a number (! @ # $ % ^ & * ( )). Windows uses these characters internally and can wreak havoc with your system if they are part of any file's name.
Examples of valid file names, including extensions are:
May 2001 Sales Report.Doc (Microsoft Word Document)
Sales Projection Calculations.Xls (Excel Spreadsheet)
Scratch Notes.Txt (Notepad Document)
New Product Announcement.Ppt (PowerPoint Presentation)
Sunset.Psp (Paint Shop Pro Image)
Did you notice there are no spaces after the period? Although file names can contain spaces, you should not use spaces in file name extensions. You can use multiple periods in a file name, but only those characters following the final period will be recognized as a file name extension. Any other periods will be treated as part of the file name.
When opening a file, Windows does not usually care about the file name. What matters is the extension. The extension tells Windows what APPLICATION is ASSOCIATED with the file. If you were to open the file Sales Projection Calculations.Xls in the above example, the Xls extension part of the file tells Windows this is an Excel spreadsheet and Windows then opens Excel and displays the contents of the file within the Excel application. (The extension can be in upper, lower, or mixed case). Similarly, any file with a DOC extension would open Word because DOC is associated with Word.
How does Windows know to open Word when a file's extension is DOC, Excel for a XLS extension, WordPerfect for a WPD extension, or Paint Shop Pro for a PSP extension? How is the association established?
The most common way to establish a file association is by installing an application. During installation, the application's Setup program makes the necessary entries in the Windows Registry and any other files that may be appropriate. Each file extension is called a "file type". Windows maintains information about each file extension, such as:
* Which program to use when opening files with that extension.
* Which icon to display against files with that extension in Windows Explorer and dialog boxes.
* The menu that is displayed when you right click on the file.
For example, Word will open any file that uses the DOC extension and if the icon looks like the illustration above, you are using Word 2000. Other versions of Word will have slightly different icons.
When you open a file with an unregistered extension, i.e. for which no program has yet been installed or specified, like our old friend DIGITALDJ.WMZ, Windows brings up the Open With dialog box, allowing you to choose the program to use for files with that extension. This dialog box has an option to make the association permanent ("Always use this program to open files of this type") which is enabled by default when the "Open With" dialog box is invoked by this means. While this is useful, there is a danger of accidentally making a trial association permanent by mistake.
Applications, or programs also have their own extensions. The program that opens Microsoft Word is named WINWORD.EXE. The EXE extension stands for Executable, which tells us WINWORD.EXE is a program file and not some other kind of file. Any file on your system that ends in EXE is a program file. These program files are the items you see in the list when you view the Open With dialog box. There are other program file extensions such as COM, BAT and PIF files. EXE files are the most important for those of us who depend on Windows. Items in the Open With dialog box are almost without exception EXE files.
With all your new found knowledge about file associations, extensions, and file naming conventions, you still haven't a clue what to do with DIGITALDJ.WMZ. However, knowledge is power, so let's use what you know to finish the job.
Fire up your modem and log on to the Internet.
On the Address line in Internet Explorer, or the Location bar if you're using Netscape, type:
This brings you to a Web site where you can search for more than 1,700 file extensions to find the associated application. You are now located at the site's File Extension Search Engine. In the text box type WMZ and click on the Search button as shown in the illustration.
Oh, drat! You got zero results. Don't despair. You can click on the File Extension Bulletin Board link to post a question and ask help from others who use the site.
While you're waiting for an answer, let's move on to another part of the Web. Go to:
HTTP://WWW.MICROSOFT.COM
In the upper right portion of the screen, click on the Search tab. You may have to scroll to get to the Search tab as the page is wide.
In the resulting dialog box type WMZ as shown in the illustration.
You got results this time, but the screen looks confusing. Read the headings for each entry carefully and scroll down the page as needed. Not much help, is it?
Notice the results are sorted according to relevance. The entries that are most likely to be useful are listed first. This can be a great time saver if your search produces several hundred hits. This example generated only a few dozen, but it's comforting to know that what you are looking for is in every entry in he list.
We're going to save a little time here. Look for the entry that begins with Windows Media Player 7 Bonus Pack Readme for : (This will save you from having to examine every entry in the list). A new screen opens and reveals some documentation about the Windows Media Player 7 program. Scroll down the page and eventually you arrive at a section called Skins for Windows Media Player 7 and there you see the file your friend sent you. DIGITALDJ.WMZ. The file turns out to be a "skin" or a way to change the appearance of Windows Media Player 7 by changing its visual features.
Windows Media Player does not come with Windows 98 or Windows 98 Second Edition, but you can download it from Microsoft's Web site. (It's free).
Point your browser to:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/software/Playerv7.asp
By the time you read this, Microsoft may have released Windows Media Player 8. Download whatever version Microsoft is pushing and you will automatically be able to use DIGITALDJ.WMZ after you move it to:
C:\Program Files\Media Player\Skins
You have discovered the program associated with WMZ files. There is nothing intuitive about this procedure and there is no logical way to look at a file extension and decide what program is associated with it. You followed a convoluted path, yet using ordinary Windows and Internet tools at your disposal, found a useful answer.
Let's summarize:
- You received an unknown file type and tried to open it.
- The Open With dialog box appeared asking you to indicate the proper program to use.
- You reviewed the concept of associating files with programs.
- You went to HTTP://EXTSEARCH.COM. This web site has a listing of over 1,700 file extensions which in this case did not help as new programs and new extensions are being added to the existing applications universe daily. The web site is updated frequently. Most of the time you need not go any further than this site.
- The Microsoft web site had the information you needed.
The Open With dialog box is one of the biggest mysteries people are confronted with when they try to open a file that is associated with a program that is not installed on their system. In most cases, EXTSEARCH.COM will identify the application associated with the file type. If that fails, as it did in this example, MICROSOFT.COM is another resource that often produces a solution. Even this sometimes fails. If you have a file that was generated by an obscure freeware or shareware program, thesteps illustrated here may not help. In that case, unless you have a way to determine the program that created the file, all you can do is highlight the file and press the Delete key. :
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Copyright 2001. This article is from the June 2001 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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