Often, your project support will include documents on your computer like Word or Excel files. You can attach the actual document, but what happens if you update the original? How can you be sure you have the latest attached? We got this very question from a GTD’er and thought it would be useful to pass along:
I am struggling with how to file electronic documents. Some of the documents live in email, some live in folder and some in the tasks in Outlook. I end up checking all three places to find the most recent copy of a document. Do you have any suggestions on the best way to handle this?
A great way to do this in Outlook is to insert a hyperlink of the file, not the actual file attachment. From within a Task note field, select to attach a file. Then choose “Insert as Hyperlink.”
This is a great tip! We do this all the time when working on a larger projects, especially to send a notice out that a drawing or SOP has a new version that should be used.
One word of caution. Make sure if you send out a hyperlink to a file that the file is saved to a common shared area – like a shared folder on a network server. If you hyperlink back to a folder on your personal computer it may not work due to access rights or your computer is not turned on.
Or even better…
Use an online service such as Google Documents or Zoho etc that allow online collaboration. You can then share your document and set by user who can view or edit your documents.
There is only one document, you don’t need to track versions. It can be shared over the internet, they don’t need to be on your network, you can access your docs while out of the office and you don’t need to rely on everyone having the same version of your Office suite
In Outlook 2007 the Insert feature no longer lists “Insert As Hyperlink” but you can still do this feature by right clicking in the message area of the task and selecting Hyperlink.
Hi Dan,
Yes, that feature does exist in Outlook 2007 as that’s what I used to create the screen shot. Perhaps you’re in a different screen? I created that from Attach File icon. The Attach Item icon does not allow this (only text or attachment of an email), but Attach File includes the Insert as Hyperlink if you click on the drop-down menu.
Kelly