Drag and Drop between Outlook Attachments and Sharepoint Document Library

  • Article

Did you know that you can drag your Outlook file attachment directly into Sharepoint?

It is straightforward with a few exceptions.   Here are the steps:

  1. Open your SharePoint site
  2. Select the Document Library to store the file
  3. Select the "Explorer View" of the Document Library
  4. Now open Outlook
  5. Open the Email with the attachment
  6. Resize Outlook so you can see the explorer view of the document library
  7. Click on the attachment and drag to the folder area of the explorer view

The beauty of this is that the file never gets pulled out of Outlook onto a local drive/directory and is less likely to present a security risk.

All is well except where your filename contains the following characters:  & ? =

The reason is that those characters are reserved for use in URL querystring commands and http protocol munges the filename and data as it transfers to Sharepoint.  If your filename does contain those letters then you will need to save the attachment to the desktop or other location then drag to the explorer view.