Creating Attachments

To attach a file to a Lotus Notes mail message, do the following:

1. Create the mail message. Make sure your insertion point (cursor) is in the message body at the exact point at which you want the attachment to appear.

2. Choose File, Attach or click the Attach icon on the toolbar. The Create Attachments dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 15.1.

3. In the Create Attachments dialog box, select the location of the file from the Look In drop-down field and navigate to the location of the file in your file system.

4. The Compress box is enabled by default. Leave this box checked.

   

   Compressed files use less space on a disk and take less time to transfer from one place to another than uncompressed files. But don't have Notes compress a file that you intend to send to a non-Notes user; the mail router will just have to decompress the file again before transferring it because Notes uses proprietary compression techniques and other mail programs probably won't be able to decompress the file. If you want to compress a file for sending to a non-Notes mail recipient, use a compression program such as WinZip.

   
   

5. Click the Create button. The attached file appears as an icon within the body of your mail message (see Figure 15.2).

Figure 15.1. The Create Attachment(s) dialog box allows you to search for the file or files you wish to attach.

Figure 15.2. The attachment icon in this mail memo shows that the file is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

The appearance of the icon depends on the type of file it represents and whether you have the original software that this file was created in installed on your PC. If you are attaching an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, you see an Adobe Acrobat icon in your mail message. If the file is a Microsoft Word file, you see a Microsoft Word icon in your mail message. If you don't have native software installed for that file, you see a generic document icon.

When you receive mail that has an attachment, a paper clip icon appears next to the mail message in your Inbox (see Figure 15.3).

Figure 15.3. A paper clip icon in the Inbox indicates that the document has an attachment.

You can add attachments to Notes documents by dragging and dropping them from your file system. To do this, resize your Lotus Notes program window and open and resize your My Documents folder (or the Windows Explorer window that displays the file you want to drag). Place the windows side-by-side and drag the file from My Documents to a rich text field in your Lotus Notes document or mail memo.