Several years back a senior administrative assistant (she'd been there about twenty years) where I was working called our help desk and I drew the call. She said she couldn't open pictures.

We were in the middle of a project rolling out Windows XP and Office 2003 and one of our images did have an issue where we had to change a registry key to allow pictures to open.

I got up to her office and as I often do I asked her to show me what she was doing.

She proceeded to open Microsoft Word, whereupon she clicked File>Open and navigated to the location where the picture was, then she chose the jpg.

I looked at her, trying to mask the amazement in my face and explained that Word wasn't really designed to open pictures. I then asked her what happened if she just opened the picture by itself and she gave me a puzzled look and asked, "How do I do that?"

I asked her to start Windows Explorer, whereupon she opened IE. After we got that shut down, I then suggested "My Computer".

Eventually I got her to navigate to the same folder she'd gone to in Word and asked her to double-click the picture.

It opened just fine.

She looked at me as if I were a wizard and said, "I didn't know you could do that!"


My real surprise was that she could manage to drive her car home after work ... since she probably used her house key to try and start the car.