Saving attachments to SharePoint

One challenge when moving your files and folders to the cloud is working with attachments, because now you want to save and retrieve them from this location. The good thing is that if you have the latest version of Outlook on your desktop then this is pretty simple.

In this article I’ll show you how to save attachments directly to SharePoint Online.

So let’s say you received an email, like the above, with a few attachments that you want to get into SharePoint Online. If you open the email and select the Attachment Tools tab at the top of the page as shown, you’ll see you have a number of Upload options in the Save to Cloud section of the Ribbon menu.

You can also right mouse click on the attachment and see the same Upload options in the menu that appears.

When you select the Upload option you’ll be presented with a number of different cloud locations into which you can save this file. These locations are dependent on the account items you have configured for Outlook. If you are an Office 365 user then you should see your own OneDrive for Business and some Office 365 Groups.

To display all the SharePoint Online options select the More… option at the bottom of the list.

This will then show you all the Office 365 Groups that also have a SharePoint Team Site tied to them. This list will also include any Microsoft Teams you have created. Unfortunately, you won’t see any “pure” SharePoint Team Sites here, just ones connected to Office 365 Groups. Hopefully, we’ll get that ability down the track.

Once you select your destination, here the Support group, the attachment will be saved into the root of the Documents library as shown above.

It would be nice if we got the ability to select from the different Document Libraries within the SharePoint Site and/or subfolders but for now at least we can get the file into a Team Site. Once the file has been saved you could then use something like Microsoft Flow to route the document elsewhere within the site or you could just move it manually if desired. You could also set up an automatic email alert in SharePoint to notified people that a new file has arrived.

When you return to the email you will see that the attachment now has a small cloud icon next to and the word “Saved” to indicate it is stored online.

So a pretty straight forward process for saving attachments in emails directly to SharePoint Online. There are some limitations in the process in that it can only save to SharePoint locations created with Office 365 Groups or Teams and that it currently only saves into the default Document Library within the Team Site but there are ways to overcome these if desired. Hopefully, we’ll see these abilities included in the near future as well to provide additional flexibility. However, it is now very easy to get attachments directly into Office 365 from Outlook.