Completely Puzzled

I have received a file attached to an email message. I trust the sender, it's a government organisation and I know the file is meant to be an organisation chart sent to me as part of a freedom of information request. However, I cannot fathom what type of file it is. The only application that has opened it is MS Publisher by choosing the option 'Recover Text from Any File'. It only opens the file and gives the text but it is not formatted as an organogram ought to be. I would like to know two things. First, how can I find out what type of file it is. Of course, I can email the sender to discover this and will do so but it would still be useful to discover the answer to this type of problem. Second, if I can identify the file type how can I go about choosing the appropriate programme to open the file. I do know how to do this if the file has an extension. For example, if the file was *.ppt (I know that's the extension for PowerPoint files) but I could run a Google search for .ppt and discover that I could open it with PowerPoint. But this file has no file extension.

I'm not attaching the file because I don't know if that will be useful. However, if anyone things they need the file to help me I'll happily attach it.

 

Save the file & right click and open with notepad, the file type will be in the first few lines or 'header'.
If it is too large try HxD hexeditor.

 

When I open it in notepad it is complete gobbledegook and there is nothing that identifies the file.

 

I'm running Vista and I'm presuming you mean the following steps:
Start>Control Panel>Folder Options. In folder options under View under Advanced Settings uncheck the option "Hide extensions for known file types." I tried that before posting (I suppose it would have helped if I'd said so). Anyway it doesn't show a file extension.

 

Do you have a pdf viewer installed? I would try to open the file with that program. My guess is a government agency would likely produce pdf documents even if they don't name them as such.

 

If it was a pdf it would have the file extension .pdf and it doesn't. I tried to open it as a pdf before I posted my problem and it won't open as a pdf.

 

Yes, I did download it to my computer. It definitely has no file extension. That is not how Vista behaves. File extensions are shown if you go for that option.

 

Hi,

Ok, so it is not a pdf. Try opening it your browser (to see if it is an HTML document).

I was looking at the Federal FOI site and it had two types of documents pdf and html.

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I downloaded a few files from .gov sites a few weeks back and a couple had no extension while the majority were pdf. I can't remember if I opened the ones with no extension in pdf viewer or Word but you have already tried both.

 

It doesn't open in a browser; I've tried Firefox (my default browser) and IE.