I’m pretty meticulous about my IT procedures, and luckily I’ve never had a major IT catastrophe. But here’s a minor IT annoyance that has heretofore sucked up an inordinate amount of my time: unsaved Gmail attachments. And now, there’s a solution!
As I’ve written about before, I use Gmail with my own domain name, to take advantage of the Gmail features without having to use a Gmail address for work. I’m not sure if this oddity is specific to Gmail, but here we go: if someone sends you a Word document as an attachment and it’s in .doc format (i.e. pre-Word 2007), Gmail will not open the document directly, and forces you to save it…so this issue does not occur. But if someone sends you a Word document as an attachment and it’s in .docx format (i.e. Word 2007 or later), Gmail gives you the option to either open the document or save it, and I most often just go ahead and open the attachment so that I can read it right away.
Here’s where you can tell that a key variable in this situation is me: I could simply train myself to *never* use the direct-open feature, but so far I haven’t succeeded at that either. Let’s continue on: you’re happily reading your direct-opened .docx document, and, here’s where I maintain that the issue isn’t just my stupidity, you’re even clicking “Save” periodically and Word is happily appearing to save (actually Word is happily saving, just not where you think it’s saving). Word does not give you the “Save As” dialog box as it would if you were trying to save a previously unsaved document. This most often happens to me when students in my classes send me their homework as a Word document; I want to get back to them right away, so I pop the thing open, type lots of comments, press Save lots of times, and then close the document, and again, there’s no prompt to choose a folder for the document (because Word is stashing it away in an undisclosed location)…the document just closes. Then when you go to reopen it, it’s not in the folder where you fantasize that you saved it (insert an image of me, frantically searching that student’s folder for their Lesson 3 homework that I just spent an hour commenting on…) and the document is not in the “Recent” tab in Word. Where the bleep is the thing?
Well, those of you who are more IT-savvy than I am probably already know that it’s in a deep, dark folder reserved for temporary documents downloaded from the Internet. I promise you, it’s there: but do not muck around and do stupid, panicky things like trying to reopen the attachment from the original e-mail in hopes that your changes will be there (they’re not there, and you’ll only overwrite the copy of the document you’re looking for: don’t ask me how I learned that). Instead, follow the instructions in this post from Oded Ran’s blog “Tech Chutzpah” and breathe a sigh of relief. Seeing that this post has eleven hundred comments made me feel better, because at least it’s not just me. Basically you need to locate the folder where your web browser stores your temporary files, and there you’ll find your meticulously edited Word document, and you can open it and finally hit Save As; Oded’s post will walk you step-by-step through what you need to do to find that folder. Thank you!!!
Why not save the word document in a safe place FIRST THING before making any changes? And using a decent application (something like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook) instead of a website UI (GMail) for your e-amil can also help.
Thanks David! Yes, as I mentioned in the post, that would be the best solution; but in the absence of training myself to do that, I’ve had to resort to this recovery technique several times, so it seemed like it might be useful for other people too. I agree with you: the best option would be to simply never work from a direct-opened version of an attachment, but like many other best-case scenarios (wouldn’t it be easier just to not leave the headlights on rather than having to ask a stranger for a jump start…), I think it’s good to have a backup plan as well.
That’s quite a coincidence: in the time between seeing your post had arrived in my inbox (an hour ago) and actually reading it (just now), the very same thing happened to me with an Excel file, and not using Gmail but another email provider…
I actually began filling in the form again from scratch – since I could not find the other one I had saved ‘somewhere’!, right…- when in occurred to me I should be saving this second file… “as..”, and that led me to the secret folder..!
I guess I should also use the “Save document as…” option when I double-click on an attachment, hum..!
Thanks for your post, Corinne!
Hi, always useful to know this, it can save your day (or night!).
This can also happen with MS Outlook, when double-clicking the attachment directly in the e-mail, then working in MS Word on the opened file.
To find the file, you can just do a search on the whole system drive (with hidden folders and files visible) using *.docx and modification date, then right-click on the results and select “Open file location”.
E.g. with Outlook on Win7, files are in C:Users\AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsTemporary Internet FilesContent.Outlook
@Morgane: i’d recommend saving the attachment directly from the browser or e-mail client software, and not open it then “save it as”.
Cheers
Fred
Thank you for sharing, Corinne.
This is a very good tip for preventing (minimizing) accidental data loss, but should not really be taken as a “safety net” or a best practice.
Even with this knowledge in the arsenal data loss can (and often) occur. The Temp folder gets emptied and overwritten in the background as part of various system maintenance routines, most of them not under the user’s control, or worse, initiated by the user in case of overwriting temp files.
This problem of the missing temp file just increased with the so-called move to the “cloud”. Like many other IT issues, it stems from prioritizing short-term convenience over long-term security.
It is therefore best to change the workflow and prioritize reliability over convenience. Forget the Open command. Whenever possible, set your browser to automatically save specific filetypes — most notably those you find yourself frequently editing — to an easily accessible folder of your choice and open them from there. A little tedious, but can save a lot of anguish overtime.