The iManage Work system can open, read, and modify many types of documents. This includes popular file types, such as Microsoft Word documents docx, Excel spreadsheets xlsx, along with less common document types, and even custom document types, such as a format proprietary to the organization.

To associate a document type to an application that can read it, two resources work together: File types, and file handlers.

• File types define lists of types of documents based on their application extension. That is the documents suffix such as Microsoft Word documents of .docx, or Adobe Acrobat documents of .pdf.

• File handlers define lists of applications that can open specified file types. This ties an application, such as Microsoft Word to a file type such as .docx.

As an example, the following defines a Word .docx document to the application Microsoft Word. The display shows the association of a file type to its corresponding file handler for a Word document .docx.

In the files type resource, the App Extension, DOCX, in step 1, is assigned the Alias of WORDX, in step 2.

The file handler resource completes the assignment by making the association of the type, WORDX, in step 3, to be the same as the alias from file type, step 2. The application is specified in the Location, in step 4.

The two resources allow the application to open the document type. For example, after the file type and file handler is defined, selecting a .docx document within iManage Work displays that document in the preview window. This system does not apply to editing documents with iManage Work For Windows. In that case, when the document is checked out, the editing occurs on the user's Microsoft Windows computer and according to Windows' governance of document handling.

More than one file type may be assigned to be opened by Microsoft Word. Each file type requires two separate entries. For example, a document type of .doc may be assigned an alias of Word2007. A text file of document type .txt may be assigned an alias of TEXT. In each case, a separate file handler is required. File types can also be associated to more than one application. For example, a txt file may be associated with both Microsoft Word, and Windows' Notepad.exe. However, one of those file handlers must be marked as the primary application. For more information about how to map document types to the same application, see Mapping multiple file types to an application.

On the File Types page, you see a table that displays information about all file types along with their metadata values. Here, you can perform the following:

• Search for the required file type using the Search field.
  

• Filter by HIPAA Compliant or App Extension fields.

• Add a file type using the Add a File Type feature.

• Edit a particular file type's metadata values using the Edit feature.

• Enable or disable HIPAA compliance for single or multiple filetypes using the HIPAA Compliant feature.
  

• Delete single or multiple file types using the Delete feature.

• View details of a file type using the View feature.