Adding Attachments

When you write an email, you often want to send an file attached with the email. Depending on the type of file, there are a number of ways of accomplishing this.

Using the Attach button

At the bottom of the Gmail composition window, there is an “attachment” button:

Clicking on this will open a File browser, allowing you to find the file and attach it. Once it’s attached, you will see an indication at the bottom the email:

If you attach a file by accident, you can use the ❌ on the attachment to remove it.

Note: the file attached will need to be readable on the recipient’s computer! For files like PDFs or photos, this is not normally a problem. Word processing files and Spreadsheets, on the other hand, can be a problem. If you are using OpenOffice, for example, you may have to export your document in a different format so the other person can read your file.

Drag and Drop

If you have a file window open, you can simply drag the file on to the email. This will bring up the “Drop files here” message:

The advantage with this method is you can select a number of files and attach them all at once. However, the same proviso regarding the recipient being able to open the files remains.

Using Google Drive

A much better way of dealing with attachments is to not use your applications at all! Rather than using Word or OpenOffice to create files, consider using Google Docs to create them. This has the advantage of having all your documents in “the cloud”, meaning you can access them from any computer, and attaching them to emails is a breeze. In addition, the recipient does not have to have any software other than a browser installed to read the files. However, using Google Drive deserves its own help page, so will not be elaborated on here.

Report abuse