OF THE LAW SOCIETY OF SCOTLAND - The Journal Online

to save changes to a previously saved item,
whereas “Save as…” is used to save for the first
time a new unsaved item, or, alternatively, save a
new instance of a previously saved item, that is, it
makes another copy of it.).
Attaching the case to an e-mail
Now you’ve got some cases saved, you may want
to send copies to the rest of your firm, so that
everyone is up to date and the firm doesn’t get
sued, or send them to the other side or to clients.
If you can do this by e-mail it saves you the
bother of printing out multiple copies.
It’s possible to attach the entire file, or indeed any
file on your machine, to an e-mail. The screenshot
at figure two used Outlook Express as the
mail client, but the same rules apply for most
clients. Start the e-mail in the usual way by
clicking “new mail”, then fill in the “mail to”,
“subject” and “body” fields as appropriate.
Then, click “Insert” from the menu bar at the top
of the mail-message. From the menu which
appears, click “File Attachment”. From the dialog
box which appears, hunt around in the “Look in”
select menu until you’ve found your “Cases”
folder. Click the file you’re interested in till its
name appears in the “File name” box, then click
the “Attach” button. In Outlook Express, another
field opens up beneath the “subject” field to show
that the file has been attached, but other clients
may show an icon in the body of the message to
show that the file has been attached. Clicking on
the icon will open the file. You can repeat this
process if you have more than one file to go.
There are other ways of attaching files. If you have
the Cases folder open, you can put the cursor
over the file, depress the left mouse button and
then physically drag the file over into the body of
the message.
Occasionally, you may want to send an entire
folder which contains several files. You can’t
directly attach a folder. In these circumstances,
you have two options. You can attach each file
from within the folder separately. Alternatively,
you can run the folder through a program called
WinZip which will recreate it as a new object
called a .zip file, which can be attached as a single
item. How to use WinZip is beyond the scope of
this article. If you don’t already have a copy of it,
go bother your IT department, as you will
inevitably receive a .zip file from someone if you
are now using e-mail, and will not be able to open
the file without it. If you start sending .zip files out,
you should note that your recipient may not have
a copy of WinZip with which to open the .zip file,
in which case they’ll probably phone you up and
tell you “that thing you sent me, there’s something
wrong with it”. If you pay for a registered version
of WinZip, it allows you to create a self-extracting
zip file which can be opened without a copy of
WinZip. However, it does this by packaging the
file as an executable, which means it is a selfcontained
program which can run without relying
on outside assistance. Your IT department will
rightly tell you that you should be very cautious
when you receive any executable attachments, as
executables can be computer viruses (it is an
executable if it has the file extension .exe). Your
clients may be reluctant to accept WinZip
executables.
When attaching a file, you should always
remember that different types of files are
associated with different programs, for example,
the cases I’ve mentioned in this article are written
in HTML, have a .htm extension and are
associated with Internet Explorer. If you send a
file which depends on a particular program, you
need to remember that the recipient may not
have that program and may be unable to read it.
To minimise the risk of this happening, you can
often simply copy’n’paste the text of the file into
the mail-message itself. It will lose it’s formatting
and some other characteristics but this is
sometimes the only option.
Journal
IT
Summary
These details may seem over-technical, but in the
recent past I have had several clients mailing me
.zip files, and writs scanned in as Jpegs. This will
become more common, and it will happen to
you, and your client will expect you to deal with
it as a matter of course. I appreciate that many of
you will regard much of this as “secretary stuff”. If
your firm has gone to the bother of getting your
desk online, you should explore the many ways
which you now have of getting information and
passing it around very quickly, without having
work sitting in a typing queue for three days.
Other possibilities start to present themselves,
once you realise that you can transfer any type of
medium by attaching it to an e-mail. If you have a
microphone and speakers on your machine, try
opening the Sound Recorder (the path is Start |
Programs | Accessories | Entertainment | Sound
Recorder). Record a bit of dictation and save the
resulting .wav file, then e-mail it to yourself. You
have e-mailed dictation, and, if you felt so inclined,
you could use a more elaborate program than
Sound Recorder to dictate anywhere and e-mail
it anywhere, say, to a branch which has excess
typing capacity at that point in time, or to an
outside transcription agency, all without any
transfer of physical objects.
e:
scownie@yahoo.com
43 May 2002 Volume 47 No 5
Figure 2