Jesus Loves You! A Prayer For You.
While downloading files and viewing websites, you’ll meet up with many file formats. Most are common, and encountered frequently, others are more obscure and require specialist programs to open or use. Here, we have a list of the file types, along with the applications you’ll need to get them going on your computer.
Standard video format supported on the windows platform. They do not stream, however, so you have to download the entire file before you can watch any of it.
Use » Windows Media Player or pick up WinAmp or QuickTime.
A way of compressing many files into one together, for the Mac only.
Use » Stuffit Expander, which can unzip stuff for the PC too.
CSS files are a tool in the repertoire of webmasters that take care of how their websites look. To read more about them, see our CSS tutorials.
CSS files can be created or edited in any text-editor, like Notepad. Try » TopStyle Lite too, it includes loads of selectors for easy editing.
Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world. You probably won’t come across loads of doc files, but if you do it can be annoying if you haven’t got a program that can open them.
Buy the hideously expensive » Microsoft Word, or just hope that it came with your computer. You can get a “Word viewer” from Microsoft too, which is free. If both of these go against your religion, you could use the free » Open Office suite, which is pretty damn good.
If you download a program that you need to install, it will likely come as an exe file.
Just double click it to install on your PC. Be careful of viruses!
The most common image format on the Internet. Good for simple images. Read our Image File Formats page for more.
Most pages you create for a website will be HTML files — What is HTML?
You’re reading one right now. Sorted.
Another very common image file format, mainly used for photos. Again, for more check out the Image File Formats page.
Midis are sequenced music files made on keyboards. They’re usually really small and often sound great, although it largely depends on your soundcard. Midi collections are one of the few places in the world where you can find classic game and movie music, and for that I salute them.
I use » WinAmp.
Singlehandedly caused a revolution. MP3 is a sound file format which is highly compressed, which allows download-happy filesizes and excellent quality. Has caused much grief for the music industry as songs are now small enough to be traded online.
Get the superb » WinAmp for the best player around.
