Tips to Easily Embed Links and Attachments In Your Emails

Email is one of the most effective methods of communication between business professionals because it allows you to maintain a trail of communication or any action items that will help everyone stay on track. However, it can be a challenge to attach larger files to your email communication. PowerPoint is the main offender, as presentations with embedded images can be quite large in size. Today’s corporate spam blockers can be set to filter out large attachments and attachments from individuals who are not in the recipient’s email contacts to help maintain security within the organization. For all these reasons — and because a link is more aesthetically pleasing than an attachment! — this quick tip will help you create a link that you can use in the body of your emails that allows you to share files.

What Are the Risks Associated with Email Attachments?

Many people view attachments on an email with a wary eye, and for good reason! There are significant risks associated with opening an attachment on an email, even if the email came from someone you correspond with regularly. Security professionals will tell you that email attachments could potentially contain a harmful virus that can attack your personal computer or your organization’s servers, which is reason enough to pause before opening.

Steps for Embedding a Link or a File in Your Email

Fortunately, there are only a few quick steps to embedding information in the body of your email and they’re available to any users of Microsoft Outlook or other key email clients. Create a new email, and add a line of text that describes the document or link that you would like to embed. This could be something similar to “Click here to learn more”, or “Here is a link to the website I wanted to share”. Once you have added that text to the body of the email, highlight one or a few words in the sentence and then right-click with your mouse to bring up a submenu. From this menu, one of the last items will be “Hyperlink”. You will then have a dialog box named “Insert Hyperlink”. From this screen, you have some options and can link to:

• An existing file or webpage
• A place in the current document
• Create a new document
• Link to an email address

Once you’ve made your choice, find or enter the correct link and click “OK”.

That’s it! You’ve successfully added a link to your email and your email looks neat, clean and professional. Your email recipient will appreciate you taking the few extra steps to simplify your email. As an added bonus, the hyperlinked file or website URL demonstrates a slightly higher level of technical proficiency than simply pasting a full (and often long!) link directly to a URL.