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Tech Tuesday: Sending Word Documents with Gmail instead of Outlook

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Here it is. One of my pet peeves: I want to email a Word or Excel file to a friend. Click File > Save and Send > Send using E-Mail > Send as attachment. Then the dreaded message appears: “You can’t do this because you haven’t installed Outlook, and since I’m a Microsoft Product, like Word and Excel, you must use me, and only me. Sincerely, the Mighty, Omnipresent Outlook.”
I hate Outlook. I don’t use Internet Explorer. But, I still want to press that one Save and Send button and have the file magically open my Gmail (or Yahoo, etc.) account, attach the file, add the appropriate subject line, and prompt me to enter recipients’ names. Is that too much to ask? I keep telling myself I’ll Google it. After spending a couple hours reading about how I can set Gmail to open whenever I click on a link to email (That’s not what I’m looking for – I can already do that!), I read about a free little program called Affixa. Affixa did exactly what I wanted it to do – send my files while I’m in the program – and took less time to install and get running than it did to comb through all the Google links to find it.
So here it is:

http://www.affixa.com/features/

Affixa Web Page
Affixa Web Page

I hope you find it as helpful as I do.

P.S. From Kris. You must set up your email account before starting, but you get prompted to do so in case you’ve forgotten, so that’s okay. You also need to add the browser plug-in, but again, you’re prompted to do so. The free version allows you to have one email account “affixed.” You have to pay for more accounts.

Deb’s P.S. to Kris’ P.S.
Warning! Only read if this part if you are really interested in this stuff: I have numerous email accounts, but I “fetch” them all into my Google App “Gmail” account(which happens to be my pixeladies.com email address). So I don’t need to have more than one email “affixed.” You would only need to pay for more accounts if you wanted to have more than one option as your “send from” address. If you get a message from me, no matter what email address you send it to, you will probably receive a reply from my pixeladies.com email address.
Just follow the prompts as Kris said, and everything works hunky-dory. Can you tell we’re not working together today? We have to converse with each other through our blog. 😉

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