Opening attachments to Outlook email

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Old Marine

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Thread was moved from "General Discussions > User Solutions and Workarounds".
Stacey M

Since upgrading my MacBook Pro to Leopard running Parallels Desktop build 5160 I have been receiving an error message when trying to open any attachment to an Outlook email message telling me that:

"Parallels Desktop cannot open file C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKF5\DOCSSEA.DOC from the guest OS. You can open only files located on Windows drives (volumes) which have drive letters assigned or in Parallels Shared Folders"

This problems exists for all file types I have tested including PDF, XLS, PPT, etc. All of these file types opened successfully prior to upgrading to Leopard.

All of my Mac applications show up in Parallels Shared Applications in the Windows start menu, but even opening them from this location still does not allow me to get an appropriately suffixed attached file to an Outlook message opened.

I have the "Share Windows Applications" and "Share Mac Applications" selected in the configuration editor as well as "Smart Select" checked (as they were when this worked correctly prior to Leopard update) The Shared Windows, Shared Mac, and Smart Select choices under Applications are grayed out and not selectable, although options under each are available - selecting populate under Shared Mac did not result in seeing a list of applications.

The only application I run on the Windows XP SP 2 VM is Outlook for Mail, Calendar, and Contacts.

Any ideas on what configuration option I need to tweak or change?
 
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I have a similar issue

Whenever I try to open a Word or Excel document using the OSX version of Office from within the VM I get an message, in excel telling me the format is invalid and in Word a file import box opens asking me to select the file type (of which WORD file is not an option).

If I copy these same files to the OSX desktop I can open them perfectly.
 
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Solidrock,

I get the same results whether I save documents to the VM system desktop or try and open directly from an attachment within the VM on Outlook. As you noted if saved to the OSX system they open perfectly.

This problem only occurs with Work and Excel files (in itself strange) and I get the same dialog box with Word and error message with Excel as you are getting. Can I assume you are running Office for Mac 2004?

So there are now at least two of us experiencing this problem. Any others on the forum having similar issues?
 
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Xenos,

Interestingly enough updating MacFUSE from 1.1.1 to 1.3.1 did the trick. Both Word and Excel documents now open properly from Outlook attachments on my configuration. Hopefully Solidrock has the same results after installing.

By the way the link you provided in your post was dead. I used

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

I selected MacFUSE 1.3.1 for OSX 10.5.

Thanks for the support and great suggestion.
 
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What a mercy!!!! Old Marine, I'm happy to know you can now open both Word and Excel files attached to Outlook e-mails! Thank you very much for the feedback.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
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This is definitely an issue *not* Leopard related.

This thread is closely related to the "To use your Windows files directly in Mac you should reinstall Parallels Desktop." and "Leopard - Outlook - Error Message" threads.

I have the same issue, and I'm crossposting so the maximum number of people can read it.
This is using

OS X 10.4.11
Parallels 5584
WindowsXP SP2
Outlook 2003

The events that caused Outlook attachments to be unable to opened by Mac applications are as follows:

The user's account was a local account, but I needed to convert it to a Network account unfortunately the shortname was the same. So I followed these steps I found on the Internet:
I renamed the user's home folder for existing local account
I deleted the local user's account (to remove it from the Netinfo database)
made the new network account
I rename the user's home folder back to the original shortname
I did a "chown" command on the folder like this:

sudo chown -R username:staff /users/username

Everything seems to be fine except for opening attachments directly from within Outlook, unless you use a Windows app to do so. If a Mac app is assigned to open the attachment, we see the same error as Old Marine does:

"Parallels Desktop cannot open file C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKF5\DocumentName.doc from the guest OS. You can open only files located on Windows drives (volumes) which have drive letters assigned or in Parallels Shared Folders".

I believe this to be a permissions error. I have checked the permissions on the C drive alias, and "Others" was set to "Read Only". I tried setting it to "Read & Write" and rebooting Windows and restarting Parallels, but that didn't work. The Group permission is still "Read only", but I don't know what group these aliases should be.
Someone on the forums suggested deleting these aliases and letting Parallels recreate them, but I'm a little nervous about that.

I also tried:
reinstalling Parallels Tools
disconnecting all Shared Folders, restarting Windows and reenabling them

If the files are on the Windows desktop they open in Mac apps fine, just not from within Outlook which is what the user expects to do.
 
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Posting this in case others find this thread as I did. If it works, let us know...

I am running Mavericks and Parallels 9 with Windows 8.1 and Outlook 2013.

I was not able to open attachments either.

I found the solution:
From Mac Finder: Finder>Preferences>General menus check connected servers.

This should display your "C:\" Drive on the desktop.

Shutdown Parallels
(Might want to reboot mac for good measure too, but I did not find it necessary)
Launch Parallels
Launch Outlook

Attachments should now open.

Goot luck!
 
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johnwillsey said:
Posting this in case others find this thread as I did. If it works, let us know...

I am running Mavericks and Parallels 9 with Windows 8.1 and Outlook 2013.

I was not able to open attachments either.

I found the solution:
From Mac Finder: Finder>Preferences>General menus check connected servers.

This should display your "C:\" Drive on the desktop.

Shutdown Parallels
(Might want to reboot mac for good measure too, but I did not find it necessary)
Launch Parallels
Launch Outlook

Attachments should now open.

Goot luck!
Click to expand...


Turns out a few days later I had the issue again and figured out why.

Parallels/Mac OS sometimes mounts the windows Drive differently on the desktop. Sometimes It mounts just the Drive "C". In this case, i cannot open any attachments.
Other times it mounts as "[C] vm_name". In this case I can open my attachments. quitting/rebooting parallels does not necessarily solve it.

I found that going to the VM Configuration:
Options Tab > Sharing > then unselecting/selecting "Mount Virtual Disks to Mac Desktop" was able to get my volume to mount correctly with the "[C] vm_name" title.

Hopefully this lets the developers track down the root cause of the issue...
 
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