Outlook Low Vision: Email Save Attachment

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan, and today we'll explore opening and saving email attachments in Microsoft Outlook. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

If you've ever received an email with something that looked like extra files tagging along, you might've wondered, "what in the world do I do with these?" If so, you've entered the world of email attachments. Think of attachments as gifts which are, well, attached to an email. They take the form of photos, videos, or text documents, which can be opened and saved to our computer.

Let's dive into our inbox, and have a look at email attachments. My inbox shows that I have a recent email from Jane, and it appears to be a response to my request for a recipe. We have two places we can look to find out if an email has an attachment. Here in our item list, we see that in addition to her name, and the subject of the email, Jane's email also shows a paperclip icon. This tells us that it has at least one attachment.

The other location is in the reading pane to the right of our items list. We see Jane's email, and beneath the header, we see a rectangle with a Microsoft Word icon. It's entitled French Silk Chocolate Pie.docx This tells us that the email has an attachment. It's a word document, and it looks like it has something to do a yummy chocolate pie. When we use our mouse pointer to select the small arrow on the right side of the rectangle, we see a dropdown menu.

To open the attachment, we move down the list and select Open with our mouse pointer. This opens our attachment, a recipe for french silk pie. Let's have a look at another technique for working with attachments. There's an interesting feature in Outlook. There is a hidden attachment tab that we only see when we bring our focus to an attachment. To display it, we single-click on the attachment in the reading pane.

Now, at the top of our window, we can see the attachment tab. In our ribbon, we see the Open icon. We can use this tool to accomplish the same task we did with the dropdown menu.

Frequently we want to save an attachment to use at a later time. It's probably no surprise we can also use a tool on our attachment tab for this task. When we move from the Open tool to the right, we see the Save As tool. Next to it, we also see the Save All Attachments tool. This allows us to save multiple attachments when we receive more than one in a single email. Let's use our mouse pointer to select the Save As tool. This opens the Save Attachment dialogue box. Now, we decide where we want to save our attachment.

By default, Outlook places it in the most recently opened location. In this example, that is my Documents folder. I happen to have a Recipes sub-folder within my Documents folder. I think that's the perfect place for this attachment. I'll use my pointer to select my scroll bar and move down the list to Recipes. I'll select Recipes with my mouse pointer, and select the Open button. Edit the name, if needed, then select the Save button. There's another method when saving an attachment that' we'll cover today. Just like our Open Attachment command, we can go to the dropdown arrow to the right of our attachment icon, and select the Save As option. We see the same Save Attachment dialogue box we used to save our attachment with the ribbon. Let's select the Save button to save our attachment for later use.

Today we explored opening and saving email attachments in Microsoft Outlook. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Microsoft Outlook.