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When is your PC like a Mac? When you're using Gmail's Drag & Drop attachments..

  • Drag & Drop Attachments
    Drag & Drop Attachments

A little tip to make your life easier... especially when emailing attachments around in a Windows environment.

Situation

So you've thrown some data into a Word document or a Spreadsheet and now you want to send it to the client.  You've saved it somewhere sensible - 53 directories deep in the appropriate project folder.

Now to attach it to an email you'd have to click "Add Attachment" and go folder hunting?

Chrome & Gmail HTML5 Drag & Drop to the rescue!

  1. Compose a new email.
  2. Save your Document/Spreadsheet etc.
  3. Hit the "Save As..." dialogue in Word/Excel/Etc.. 
    ( Don't hit Ctrl+Shift+S 'cos that doesn't work. Don't get me started! )
  4. Don't re-save... but you'll find the document you saved last time... drag that to Gmail to attach.
  5. Cancel the "Save As... " dialogue... you don't need it.

Chrome Downloads Bar

NB this also works very well from the Chrome downloads bar...  go into one mail, download one or two attachments, compose a new mail and drag the attachments back up from the download bar.

Firefox too, but not IE or Safari?

As far as I know this works in Firefox and Chrome only guys, sorry.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that.  

Any tips you'd like to share?

Leave a comment... do... 

Posted years ago by Jim Morrison

Tagged as: HTML5, Gmail, Google, HTML5 Drag & Drop, Chrome, Tips and Tricks

Jim is a director of Deep Blue Sky Digital, a web development and design studio in the city of Bath in the UK.  He loves to get involved in his client's businesses to help push them forward and out onto the web but his real pasion is for code... Perl, PHP, sh, javascript... it doesn't really matter as long as it works!  You can follow Jim on twitter @deepbluetweets and @jimbomorrison

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4 Comments on this post

  1. Peter said “PC and Mac?” years ago
    Gravatar for Peter

    What does this have to do with PCs and Macs? What is so difficult about emailing attachments around in a Windows environment?

  2. Jim said “@Peter” years ago
    Gravatar for Jim

    I just don't find Windows a very draggy/droppy environment.... and I dislike the way when you want to add an attachment, open a file and particularly upload to a website the default behaviour is to start in a dialogue, usually in "My Documents".

    Uploading to websites (including Gmail of course) is the killer... because it's completely non contextual.

    Macs aren't really any better with the whole file-upload thing though are they.. in fact in some ways they're worse.. you're right. Sorry.

    I had a RISCOS upbringing.. there's no helping me! ;-)

  3. Peter said “Draggy” years ago
    Gravatar for Peter

    Aaah I understand... I've only recently started using a Mac (MBP) so I was hoping to find some hidden Mac UI gem here ;-)

    Anyway this sort of drag-and-drop is very common to Windows (although there is always some applications that don't support it), almost anything that can be selected, can be dropped into another application that would except the selected object. (Try to select a few cells in Excel, and then drop them into GMail, you'll have an instant table!) And some applications even support right-mouse-button-drag-n-drop, often showing a menu with options when "dropping".

    It's actually my MBP where I have problems with drag-n-drop, but that is not due to the OS, but because I can't properly "drag" using a touchpad. (Because I often can't reach my destination with only one "swipe".)

    And yes I vaguely remember the Acorns :-)

  4. Ben said “Safari-happy” years ago
    Gravatar for Ben

    I'm glad to let you know that gmail's drag 'n' drop does work in Safari 5 just as well as Chrome -- after all, they DO run on the same rendering engine ;)

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