Douglas St.Clair wrote:
My son has been using hotmail. He opened an email attachment, it was a
spreadsheet, made changes then did a save (not his usual save as) and
the file vanished. He is not computer literate. I'm not sure whether
he was using calc or excel.
Could the path to the document have been out to the hotmail server and
not to his local system and when push came to shove the document
couldn't be written to the hotmail server?
Douglas,
Yes, your summary is pretty close to accurate. The file he edited
MAY still be on his computer somewhere, in a temporary folder or
something. He may be able to find it by searching the entire hard
drive for the filename, if he remembers the name, or using Spotlight
(if on a Mac) or Google Desktop (if on a PC) or something to search
the contents of all files on the hard drive for a specific phrase
that was in the file.
It's generally not a good idea to edit and save e-mail attachments,
using any e-mail program on any type of computer. This is true
whether using a Web-based e-mail like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo mail,
etc., or using a locally installed e-mail program like Thunderbird,
Eudora, Outlook, etc.
What typically happens is:
- The attachment starts out encoded in such a way that it can be
sent across the Internet as part of an e-mail.
- You click on the attachment or something to open it.
- The e-mail program decodes it back into normal format and stores
it as a temporary file on your computer's hard drive, and then
opens that temporary file in some appropriate program so you can
see the contents. For example, XLS files may be opened by OOo
Calc or MS Excel, DOC files may be opened in OOo Writer or MS Word,
PDF files may be opened in Adobe Reader, JPG files maybe opened in
a variety of image viewers or editors, etc.
So far, so good. Someone sent you an attachment and you were
able to view it.
Here's where it starts to go wrong:
- You make changes and click "Save".
- The program (Calc, Excel, Writer, Word, Reader, etc.) saves the
changes to the temporary location om your hard drive.
- You go back to your e-mail, thinking perhaps that the encoded
attachment has been updated, and perhaps you forward it to
someone else, or file away the message for later, or whatever,
but it still contains the original version without your
changes.
- Eventually, the temporary version with your updates may get
deleted from the temporary location.
To avoid problems like this, you should never edit e-mail attachments
directly. Instead, if you decide to make changes, do a "Save As" to
save the file in a known location, then make changes, then save it
again with the updates. The e-mail attachment is still not updated,
but the copy in a known location is. Then, if you want to send the
updated copy to someone, create a new e-mail and attach it, or
reply to or forward the old e-mail, but explicitly delete the old
attachment and attach the updated file from the known location.
Sorry, that's how it works. Mail programs don't typically prompt
you for where to save an attachment that you are likely to just be
opening to view, not edit. And editing programs like Calc, Excel,
Writer, Word, Reader, etc., don't know there's a problem when you
tell them, even indirectly via your e-mail program, to open a file,
change it, and save it back to the same location, which may be a
temporary location.
Hope this helps...
--Fred
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Fred Stluka -- mailto:f...@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/
Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service!
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