Do you edit and save attachment back to an email message?

[Slipstick]

Outlook has a nifty feature (or design flaw, depending on who you talk to): you can open an attachment and edit it, then save it and the changes save to the original email message.

You had to work in this order:
Open message
Open attachment
Edit attachment
Save and close attachment
Save and close message

This sounds simple but its easy to mess up: If you closed the message first, the changes to the attachment didn't save back to the message. Then, if you closed the attachment without saving it to your documents folder, all of your edits could be lost (or hard ot find in the secturetemp folder). If you saved and closed the attachment first then closed the message but didn't save changes, the attachment wasn't updated.

Because there were so many ways this could go wrong, administrators generally hate this feature.

[firesheep67]

I voted "yes," but for the executive I work for. He (unfortunately) uses this feature all the time and we've lost several documents in the process, as they were being saved to the temp directory when an error occurred, forcing us to shut down Outlook.

He's still on OL 2003 and I both dread and look forward to OL 2010 forcing him to use "Save As" when editing attachments...

[Slipstick]

Were you able to recover the documents from the securetemp folder? It's usually possible, expecially in the older versions. Outlook 2007 and 2010 do a better job of cleaning up temp files and the files are more likely to be lost.

[phlarkincpa]

My employer uses Lotus Notes and yes, I do. We are striving toward paperless (ha!) and are saving supporting documents for accounting entries electronically. Sometimes I will edit Excel attachments to improve the layout for printing and save them back to the email. I like the capability.

[bishro]

I love this feature, and am not looking forward to 2015 (or so) when my employer finally gets on OL2010. (We just upgraded to OL2003 at work!)

I regularly get spreadsheets from people, and often, those spreadsheets are not set to print properly "out of the box". Either the print area has been set to be too large, or they hardcoded the scaling percentages rather than setting the number of pages, or they had the active worksheet set to a blank sheet -- all of these prevent me from printing the file directly from Outlook, so I'll update the spreadsheet and save it back to the message for archiving.

Adding the "Save As" and delete/reattach steps needlessly adds extra time to this process.

[wim.eising]

I actually never dare to do - tricky system as many stories have proven.
I think a much better option would be a functionality (button) in office that allows the user to send the amended file as an attachment in a reply email to the original sender.... Means: you open the office attachement, make your changes, click on the "send changed document back to sender" button, which opens a reply email with the changed file attached.
Wim

[Slipstick]

I actually never dare to do - tricky system as many stories have proven.
I think a much better option would be a functionality (button) in office that allows the user to send the amended file as an attachment in a reply email to the original sender....

I believe something like this is under consideration.

[Susan Kridler]

Why not allow the user to edit and save an attachment, but give a warning? When they save, tell them that that the file they are saving is still an attachment to an e-mail message, and offer the choice to continue, or to navigate and save elsewhere.

Background:
I work in technical support for a large university, where several administrators prefer to edit attachments and save their edits in the original e-mail messages. I have seen other people become confused when they immediately began editing an attachment and saved, forgetting to use "Save as" instead. Therefore, they did not realize the edited attachment was still in e-mail and needed help getting back to it. I can see why people would want to keep the edited files in the e-mail message, though they do risk a problem if Outlook crashes. After all, that risk is present anyway, if Word crashes.