How many times has this happened to you?
You fire up Internet Explorer and open up your Yahoo, Gmail, or other email system and check your Inbox. There it is, an email with a Word attachment. You open the attachment. You edit it and save it. Now you can’t find it.
Common misunderstanding: The changes are not saved with the email.
When opened the attachment, it was saved somewhere on your computer. The key is to pay attention to where you saved it, so you can get it back. You need to do this when you save it.
If you are using a browser, you need to get used to what happens when you click a link to any kind of file. Here’s why:
- Internet Explorer asks you if you want to open or save it.
- Firefox asks you if you want to open or save it.
- Chrome downloads it to your downloads folder.
- Safari … well you get the idea.
If you tell it to Save, you have an opportunity to tell it where you want to put it. This is when you need to pay attention. Usually, it wants to save it either the last place you saved something or the Downloads folder.
If you tell it to Open, it will launch the application associated with the document. In this case, it would start Word. It hasn’t really saved it anywhere.
In more recent versions of Word, the only option you have is to save it to the Documents folder or the folder of your choice. In earlier versions, it would often be saved to a temporary folder. Then it would be way harder to find!
Next time: Document or File?
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