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Many people access the material from this web site daily. Most just take what they want and run. That's OK, provided they are not selling on the material as their own; however if your productivity gains from the material you have used, a donation from the money you have saved, however small, would help to ensure the continued availability of this resource.
Click the
appropriate button above
to access PayPal. |
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I opened an Outlook
attachment and made changes. Now I can't find that file! |
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Never open Word documents directly from Outlook attachments.
Always save to the hard drive first and open from
there.
Otherwise, there's a small increased risk of virus
infection, but more significantly any changes you make to the document
may be saved in a volatile temporary file and
if so, may be lost when you close the
document.
If that is all you have done and have not re-opened the
file from the attachment, it may be possible to recover the
changed file from the temporary file location.
Start with the method suggested Below. If that
doesn't work for you, continue to the second method
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| Note: |
Microsoft appears to have got on top of this problem.
Since preparing this web page in July 2007, the way attachments are
handled in Outlook (certainly in Outlook 2003 and 2007) when saved has
changed. Documents open in read-only mode, cannot readily be saved in
the temporary folder structure and are saved in the "My Documents"
folder by default.
For other versions, or where updates have not been
applied, the following may help. |
| Try this method first |
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If you have not already done so, set Windows Explorer to
display hidden files and folders from its Tools > Folder Options >
View menu:
From the Windows > Start > Run dialog - type "%Temp%" and
press Enter |
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This will
open an Explorer Window into your user temporary file area of Windows:
In the left
window click "LOCALS~1 which will open another Explorer Window:
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| A revised
method |
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If
the locations in the illustrations shown above do not apply on your PC, then the safest procedure to
adopt would be to attach a test document (the content is immaterial) to
a message and e-mail it to yourself. View the message. Right click
the attachment and use 'Open' to open the attachment in Word.
Opening the document will create temporary working files in the
temporary folder Outlook uses for this purpose. The file will be opened
from the temporary location which your PC uses to store attachments.
Save the document in the temporary folder. With that document still
open, select 'Open' from Word, which will now have set its focus to the
temporary location. Open the required document which should have your
changes and save it to your usual document folder e.g. My Documents, as
shown in the following sequence of illustrations. |
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You can then open the document from Word. It the document
does not appear in the folder in the above illustration, or if you have
opened it again from the attachment and saved it with the same name
(which should no longer be possible) any changes you
originally made to it are lost. |
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