Working on a sent attachment

[JB]

Hello
I've always known that in order to amend or work on an attachment that I've
received in an email (i.e. Excel) , I have to first save it in MyDocuments
or such like, and then re-attach it to send back. This is automatic to me.

In the last 2 weeks I've come across 3 people who've forwarded back an email
with an attachment that they've amended, clicked on save, and sent, only to
be told that the attachment had no change, of course.

These are people who have been using computers for years. So I'm thinking
maybe it's me. Have I missed something?
When you open an attachment, why is there the option to Save and not SAVE As
automatically like a read-only.
How do you explain to people with 'the computer lost it' frame of mind, that
they didn't actually save it although they swear blind that they did,
because it's logical to save and send back.

When this does happen, and you save an attachment directly from the email,
is there a way of getting into that temp folder to then send the one you
worked on? (my sister in law is near a breakdown as she worked on an
attached Excel spreadsheet for hours)

Thanks
J

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

I've always known that in order to amend or work on an attachment that I've
received in an email (i.e. Excel) , I have to first save it in MyDocuments
or such like, and then re-attach it to send back. This is automatic to me.

Excellent practice.

In the last 2 weeks I've come across 3 people who've forwarded back an email
with an attachment that they've amended, clicked on save, and sent, only to
be told that the attachment had no change, of course.

These are people who have been using computers for years. So I'm thinking
maybe it's me. Have I missed something?
When you open an attachment, why is there the option to Save and not SAVE As
automatically like a read-only.
How do you explain to people with 'the computer lost it' frame of mind, that
they didn't actually save it although they swear blind that they did,
because it's logical to save and send back.

When this does happen, and you save an attachment directly from the email,
is there a way of getting into that temp folder to then send the one you
worked on? (my sister in law is near a breakdown as she worked on an
attached Excel spreadsheet for hours)

Since you cannot open a file on a computer unless it is on the hard drive,
when you open an attachment directly from a mail message, Outlook extracts the
attachment to the Outlook Secure Temp Folder, which, by default, if a
subfolder of the Temporary Internet Files folder. Windows Explorer has
adjustments in it that don't allow you to browse the TIF folder directly, so
you normally can't see the Outlook Secure Temp folder. If you know it's exact
path, however, you can enter that path into Windows Explorer and see it. The
path to that folder is a registry setting and you can read about it here, as
well as find a couple of tools that will allow you to access more easily:
http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/securetemp.htm

When you save changes to an opened attachment, the changes get written back to
the temp folder, but they do not necessazrily get written hack to the original
mail message where the file was attached. Unless you explicitly save the
changes to that message, the original attachment remains intact and unchanged.
That's why when they forward the original message, it usually contains the
original attachment, because editing an attachment changes the temp file, not
the message.