May be two separate issues. Since all items are triangulated (known as tesselation) at render (without changing the files actual mesh) you may consider this to be a hidden tri mesh, but you wouldn't edit it. You can however view it to see how the render will be tesselated. To view this, select the object, then in the attribute editor expand the Mesh Component Display flag. There check the Display Triangle option.
To actually covert the mesh to tris, you would use the triangulate option under the Polygons menu.
Hope this make sense.
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