What’s Your Extension?

Searching and downloading a file extension software may take your time but it can save you from a terrible headache over not knowing weird file extensions’ titles, advises Hafsa Ahsan

How often does it happen to you that you ask for a file to be sent to you via email? You must have made the request countless times and you might also have been struck with some weird file extensions that you may not be able to open.

For instance, you receive an email — you open it and try to download the simple MS Word document, but fail. Then you realise that the extension of the file is ‘name.docx’ instead of ‘name.doc’.

If you are an expert computer user, you will immediately realise that you have an older version of MS Word which will not let you open the file. However, if you are a novice, then you are mostly likely to be stumped than anything else. And this is where websites like ‘File Extensions’ come in. This website has a massive collection of various file extensions along with their definitions. You can look here for the name and description of any file extension which you want to use and know about.

There are three ways to hunt down a file extension. You can search for the extension, which, of course is the simplest; can browse through different file extensions alphabetically, or you can go through the different categories to locate your desired extension. All these file extensions are divided into different categories, e.g. audio files, binary files, database files, document files, system files, text files and many, many more.

This website not only tells you what the file extension stands for, it also lets you know what might be the best software to open any particular file. It also offers links to the homepage of the software which is needed to open that particular file extension, so you do not have to search for it separately.

If you are here mainly out of curiosity, then you should consider browsing the section on the most visited file extensions as well as the section detailing common file extensions.

The website also offers a free scan of your registry — once you do that, it can fix the file extension errors, if it finds any. However, you must remember that editing the registry has its own issues, so use this feature carefully, and it is better if you know how to make a backup of your registry, so that you can roll back any changes if they cause problems later.

As far as the layout of the website is concerned, the homepage can make your head spin. For instance, there is a main left hand menu pointing to the different types of the files extensions, the presence of search boxes, links to the top 10 file extensions and all their title names will add to your headache. However, the good part is, once you locate the search box, you can directly search for your desired extension the next time you visit the website.

Overall, this website definitely comes in very handy when you try to open a file and you get that ever-annoying dialogue box, asking you to specify the software needed to open the file. In that case, go onto this website, search for the file extension, download the required software and that is all. To find out more about different file extensions, log on to http://www.file-extensions.org