Tip 787: Edit and Save Attachments to an email

Outlook has a nifty feature (or design flaw, depending on who you talk to): you can open an attachment and edit it, then save it and the changes save to the original email message. (The feature was removed from Outlook 2010.)

You had to work in this order:

Open message
Open attachment
Edit attachment
Save and close attachment
Save and close message

This sounds simple but its easy to mess up: If you closed the message first, the changes to the attachment didn't save back to the message. Then, if you closed the attachment without saving it to your documents folder, all of your edits could be lost (or hard to find in the secturetemp folder). If you saved and closed the attachment first then closed the message but didn't save changes, the attachment wasn't updated.

Because there were so many ways this could go wrong, administrators generally hate this feature.

I've written about this problem a few times over the last few months: when you open an attachment on an open email by double clicking on it, the attachment is always read-only in Outlook 2010. In previous versions of Outlook it was editable and if you did it correctly, you could edit the attachment and save the changes back to the email message. People who are used to doing this are annoyed by the change in behavior in Outlook 2010.

Anyone who receives an email with images attached will be unable to rotate the image in an image viewer. A workaround for those using Photo Viewer exists: in Photo viewer, click on File, Properties, General tab then clear the Read only check. Repeat for each image.

The read only attribute can't be changed for Word and Excel documents, however you can open the message, put it into edit mode then open the attachment and edit.

For easiest access to the Edit Message command, add it to the QAT. If you need help with this, instructions and a video tutorial are here: Edit and Save Outlook 2010's Read-Only Attachments

Published September 30, 2010. Last updated on December 27, 2013.