Friday, February 19, 2021

Opening attachments in HCL Verse and Chrome

I've often been frustrated when trying to open or download attachments when using IBM/HCL Verse in a Chrome browser window. I always end up looking at a raw version of the file. And I have to struggle to get back to the referring message. Then, after fumbling around with it a bit, I switch to Firefox or Edge to open the file. It occurred to me this morning (duh!) that I should look up the procedure for handling attachments in HCL's documentation. There I found a solution: "(Google Chrome only) Save attachments by using drag and drop."  

Oh, so that's how you do it! And, okay, it's a Chrome quirk that's causing the problem. 

So I tried drag and drop and it did solve my problem.

But drag and drop is sort of a cumbersome procedure, especially when using a laptop computer with a small, crowded screen and a touch pad. You have to set up your desktop for it before doing it, arranging windows side-by-side, that sort of thing. Then you have to make sure you don't let up off the mouse button or touch pad during that long, perilous journey across the desktop.

So, still not satisfied, it occurred to me to try right-clicking on the attachment in the message. In the menu that popped up I saw "Save link as...". Looked promising. Tried it. A Save As dialog opened. I navigated to the folder where I wanted to save the attachment. Clicked Save. Opened the saved file (in Excel in my test). Ta-da! It worked. There was my file.

Suggestion to @HCLDSSup: Add this right-click procedure to the product documentation as an alternative to drag and drop in Chrome. It's much less cumbersome. And, thanks, Reader, for reading this all the way to the end.