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OPENING A "DOCUMENT" FILE
Windows 95 advertizes itself as a
"documentcentric" operating system, which means
that it is document-centered rather than
application-centered. One way this is true is that you
have on the Start Menu (what pops up after you click the
"Start" button) an item called
"Documents". When you click on that, you will
see a list of the most-recently opened documents. To
continue your work on one of those, click on it, and the
application which was last used to process the document
is re-run with the chosen document as its input.
"Document" in this case is not necessarily
limited to such things as word-processing files created
by programs like Word for Windows or Word Perfect for
Windows. It can also include things like spreadsheets,
data bases, graphic images...
If you are in the Windows 95 Explorer, you can see
another way in which Windows 95 is documentcentric. You
know that if you double click on a file which has a file
extension of ".EXE" or ".COM", you
will immediately start running the program. Files with an
extension of ".EXE" or ".COM" are
application files. On the other hand, files with
extensions such as ".DAT", ".DOC",
".TXT", ".GIF", ".BMP", and
many others, are data files. These files provide the data
that applications process in some way or another. What
used to be called "document files" are those
word processing files that are processed by word
processing applications like Word Perfect or Microsoft
Word. And they had certain standard file extensions like
".DOC" or ".TXT". Now the term
"document" has been extended to include other
types of data files, like data base files, graphic files
or spreadsheets.
So in Explorer you double click on a file called
"README.TXT"; what happens? Well, since the
standard file extension ".TXT" is connected
with a Windows program called Notepad, you immediately
start up Notepad showing the contents of README.TXT. If
you click on a file whose extension is ".DOC",
then Windows assumes you have the program Microsoft Word
and will attempt to start it up. Suppose you don't have
Microsoft Word? Then you get an error message to that
effect.
Now it happens that the program WordPad which is included
in Windows 95 (it takes the place of the program Windows
Write that was included in Windows 3.x) can process
Microsoft Word documents. Wouldn't it be nice to be able
to tell Windows 95 to use WordPad instead of Word to edit
a ".DOC" file? You can. One way is this:
instead of double clicking on "ZOOM.DOC", for
instance, which will try to use Microsoft Word to process
the file, instead you right click on "ZOOM.DOC"
while holding down the shift key. This opens up what is
called a context menu that includes the item "Open
With..." After you click on that item, what will be
displayed is a dialog box that lists each of the
applications that Windows 95 thinks can handle the file
ZOOM.DOC. One of these will be WordPad, so click on that,
and WordPad will start up with ZOOM.DOC as its input. You
can click on a check box that says "Always use this
program to open this type of file" in order to do
just that...
The second option you have might be more useful. If you
don't have the Microsoft Word program on your computer,
then you would really rather tell Windows 95 to ALWAYS
use the WordPad program to process a ".DOC"
data file instead of Microsoft Word. Here's how you do
that: double click on "My Computer" on your
desktop. Click on the "View" menu. Then click
on the "Options" menu item. Click on the
"File Types" tab. Find the Microsoft Word 6.0
document type in the registered file types list that you
get in the Options dialog box. Click on it. Then click on
the "Edit..." button. In the Edit File Type
dialog box that you now get, click on the
"New..." button. In the "New Action"
dialog box you receive, type "Open in WordPad"
in the action field, and "C:\Program
Files\Accessories\Wordpad.exe" in the
"Application used to perform action" field.
After you click on OK, you will now find that whenever
you right-click on the ".DOC" document type,
you'll see an option for opening with WordPad.
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