Forcing a Document to Open in an Application (OS X)

Typically, all you have to do to open most documents is to double-click it or drag it over the icon for application that created it in the Mac OS X dock and (tah-dah) it opens! But once in a while, the application just won’t recognize a file. For example, Microsoft Word doesn’t want to open a text file created in a different program, such as WordPerfect, even though you know the two are compatible. To force Word to open the document, try holding down the Command + Option keys, then drag the file over again. In almost every case, Word the application will now open the document for you.