Importing to Unity from Blender questions

Hey guys, I'm working on a project with a group at school. I had a few questions about importing a model from Blender into Unity, so here goes. I read the information on unity3d about importing models from blender

(http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html)

and my one of my group members sent me, via email, the .blend files. It came zipped with three files. An Animation.txt file, a ModelName.blend file, and a ModelName.blend1 file. The latter two are both of BLEND and BLEND1 file type respectively. So, i took those files and placed them in my assets folder in Unity, however, I get this error in the console:

Unable to open Assets/ModelName_animated.blend: Check external application preferences

and also this error: Blender could not be found. Make sure that Blender is installed and the .blend file has Blender as its 'Open with' application!

Ahaha, i'm pretty sure I just answered my own question with the errors on the console, but do I need to have Blender installed on my computer to open up a model that someone sent me? I'm assuming i do, but was also just curious if there was a way not to. Thanks for the help anyone.