Saving an E-mail Attachment

This short article will describe why and how, when you open an attachment in Microsoft Word, you need to click on "SAVE AS" and not "SAVE" when you save it for the first time

You and/or your friends are working on a Microsoft Word Document, you email it to yourself, and then you open the attachment. You click on "Save," so surely the changes that you make to the file are safe, right?

WRONG!!!

If you click on File->Save after opening it as an E-mail attachment, and then close the document, the file will be completely lost. When you open the e-mail attachment, Microsoft Word creates a temporary file in which the file is downloaded onto your computer so that you can read the document. Your file is NOT "re-created" on your computer in a safe place, because Microsoft Word assumes that you are just reading the file - since you have opened it from an email attachment.

The second you close the document, any changes that you have made are lost, regardless of any changes you may have "saved."

So instead of clicking on "File->Save" the first time you want to save some changes to a document that you have opened from an E-mail attachment, you need to click "File->SAVE AS"!!! This will then ask you where you want to create a permanent file, and where to save it on your computer. After clicking "File->Save As" once, THEN, on subsequent changes that you make, you can click "File->Save" or hit the Control Key with the letter S as a shortcut (CTL+S, in Microsoft Word using Windows will save your files. It's a neat short-cut trick. If you want to be sure, however, just go to File-Save).

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