Email attachments simplified

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Hello welcome to the Computers with Ease podcast, one of the most frequent questions I get asked about is using attachments with e-mail. So I thought I would talk about some of the basics involved in using attachments. For our purposes I’m going be talking about attachments in relation to two different programs, one being Gmail e-mail the other one being Outlook e-mail.

Attachments can be anything that you want a PDF file, word document, a photo or spreadsheet basically anything on your computer that you want to send it to someone else along with an e-mail.

I’ll start by talking about Gmail once you opened your new e-mail and put in all the information such as who the e-mail is to, the subject line and the body of your e-mail itself you will find part way down the page you will see something that says attach a file.

If you click on that, the computer will come up and ask you where is the file that you want to attach with this e-mail. You can then navigate to where the particular file is you want to send along with the e-mail click on it and it will then attach that file along with the e-mail.

You can attach several files if you like my only caution here is make sure that you don’t attach too many so that you overload your e-mail server, because some servers have a limit to how large your files can be that you can send with an e-mail.

But essentially once you have attached the file you simply send the e-mail as you normally would. The person on the other end who gets the e-mail with the attachment simply clicks on it to open it or if they’re using Gmail as well they want it to option to view it or download it to their computer whichever is most appropriate for them.

Now if we switch to looking at attachment in Outlook, it’s slightly different in that instead of having something that says attach a file you have a button on your toolbar that looks like paperclip, and by clicking on that you are essentially able to once again navigate to where the file is and attach that to your e-mail that you want to send and send the e-mail as you normally would.

Once again the person on the other end will simply see the paperclip in their e-mail when the e-mail comes in, so they’ll know that there is an attachment there and it will be at the bottom of the e-mail itself.

They simply click on it to open it and look at it, if you are going to send pictures which is a frequent thing for example with families all over the place often they send photos back and forth, but one thing with photos if you look at them click on them to open and sometimes they tend to be very large and you only see a small portion of the picture on your screen for example the upper left-hand corner.

This means that for whatever reason Outlook is opening the photo in full size, and my recommendation so that you can see the entire picture properly so it fits on your screen is to save the attached photo somewhere on your computer and then open the picture to view it using a photo viewer such as Windows photo viewer or whatever photo viewer that you are familiar with.

In most cases using this program it will size the photo properly to fit on your screen and you’ll see the entire photo. If you would like a free e-book on the subject of e-mail and attachments go to my website which is http://www.computerswithease.com and find the link in the sidebar.

If you have any questions comments or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at darrell@computerswithease.com you may also want to visit my website which is www.computerswithease.com. Thank you very much.

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