Saving edits in MS-Word email attachments?

[PJF]

I sent a WORD document as an attachment to an email. The person who
received it edited in some comments and attempted to send the edited
document back to me. He did not hit REPLY since that deletes the
attachments. So he FORWARDED the original email and with the edited
attached WORD document to me. But.....the edits were missing when I opened
the attached WORD document. He opened his edited WORD document that he had
sent me attached to the forwarded email and found the edits had not been
saved.

Question: is there a way of editing a WORD attachment, saving it including
the edits and sending it back to the original sender without opening the
original WORD document and saving it to a directory, then, when returning
the edited document attach it to a reply email message?

Any solutions or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

PJF

 

[Charles Kenyon]

The only way I would try to do this is to save the attachment (without
opening it) to the hard drive. Edit it there and save with the edits. Then
send it elsewhere as an attachment. There are a number of good reasons to
not open attachments directly from email.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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[PJF]

Thanks Charles. Your suggestion sounds a bit more efficient than what I
described. I would be interested, however, in what the reasons for not
opening an attachment directly from the email message. I do make it a
practice to save attachments that might be malware and check them with my AV
program. Where there remains a question, I simply delete the entire
message. But if there are other technical reasons for saving and then
opening say a WORD attachment, if you could point me to a web site that
might provide that info, I'd be most grateful.

Kindest regards,

PJF

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When you open an attachment directly from an email, it is saved in a
temporary folder, and all the edits you make to it are made to a temporary
file, which is deleted when you close Word. When you forward an email with
an attachment, you are forwarding the email with the original attachment;
there is no way to forward an email with an edited attachment, since the
edits are not made to the actual attached file.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

The two big reasons are malware, which may or may not escape your virus
scan, and that it is very easy to lose things opened directly from an email.

One gimmic that creators of malware have been known to use is double
filename extensions so that something looks like a document file in an email
attachment but is really a vbscript or an exe file. When these are saved to
a hard drive, their true nature becomes a bit more obvious.

I believe there are other reasons, those two are enough for me, though. No,
I can't point you to a web page.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
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[PJF]

Thanks, Suzanne. I knew that the attachment, when opened, went into a
subdirectory below the IE5 directory. But was unaware that the edited
attachment was deleted when I closed WORD.

BTW, I know the Fairhope area quite well, having attended Spring Hill
College and working in the Mobile area for several years. Hope the storms
this past fall didn't do much, if any damage there. Used to drive across
the River Styx quite often on the way to Pensacola.

Kindest regards,

PJF

 

[PJF]

Again, thanks Charles. So far I haven't run into the double filename
extension since I always deleted the message with an attachment that looked
the least bit suspicious. Thanks for the reminder!

PJF

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Sample double-extension filename:

"ClassReunion.doc
..exe"

What shows up under attachments is "ClassReunion.doc" because the real
extension is off the screen. When you put it in Windows, it will give you an
exe icon rather than a Word icon and you may actually see the whole name if
you simply click on the file.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.

 

[PJF]

Again, thanks Charles for your further elaboration.

Kindest regards,

PJF

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Amazing how many NG readers are familiar with this area. We had little
damage in Fairhope, but the Grand Hotel in Point Clear is still making a
painful recovery, which has really hurt business downtown, which depends
heavily on tourist trade.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

I just tried this.

1) Open attachment from email.
2) Make changes.
3) Close document. When asked to save changes, click Yes.
4) Open attachment again from email. The changes are there.
5) Forward email with attachment to self. The changes are there.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Glad that works for you. Try closing Word or rebooting Windows and then
opening the original email again.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

I exited Word, exited Outlook, then rebooted. The changes persist.

The file is located in Temporary Internet Files in the OLK folder.

Upon further testing, though, I note that if I exit Outlook before saving
the open attachment and then close the attachment, Word will ask if I want to
save changes but clicking Yes will not save the changes to the original
attachment. Instead, without indicating it is doing so, Word appends a number
to the end of the document title, then saves the document as a separate
document in the OLK folder with the new name.

 

[PJF]

Many thanks. I'll give your procedure a try.

Regards,

PJF

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

What he should have done was select Send from the File menu in Word when he
had the modified document as the activedocument.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP