How to Transfer Documents in iPhone via E-Mail

When you need to get documents onto the iPad or iPhone quickly, you can simply e-mail them to an account n t iPad or iPhone. You can then open the documents directly from the e-mail.

E-mail may seem like a kludgy solution to document transfer but it’s effective both for personal use and enterprise use–up to a point. Because th iPad and iPhone enable you to open a document from Mail in another app, you can easily view or edit documents you’ve received via e-mail. And if necessary, you can use Mail to send a document back after you’ve edited it, or send it along to the next person who needs to deal with it.

To get a document out of an e-mail message and into an app’s storage area, follow these steps:

1. In the message list, touch the message to display its contents.
2. Touch and hold the document’s button in the message until Mail displays a menu.
3. If you want to open the basic viewer for the document, touch the Quick Look button; normally, though, you’ll do better to
open the document in an app. If you want to open the document in the default app, touch the Open In “App” button (where App is the app’s name). Otherwise, touch the Open In button to display the Open In menu, and then touch the app you want to use.

That’s the most efficient way to copy the document from the message and get it into the app. But what you’ll probably want to do often is viw the contents of the document so that you can decide which app to open it in. For example, if you receive a Word document on the iPad, you may want to bring it into Pages so that you can use Pages’ streamlined layout tools. But if you simply want to edit the document as a Word document, you’ll do better to open the document in Documents To Go or a similar app that can maintain the Word document format.

To view a document and then decide which app to use for it, follow these steps:

1. In the message list, touch the message to display its contents.
2. Touch the button for the attached document you want to open. The iPad or iPhone displays the document in the viewer.
3. Touch the Open In button to display the list of apps that can open the document.
4. Touch the app in which you want to open the document.

This approach leaves the document open in the viewer in Mail. So when you go back to Mail, touch the Message button (on the iPhone) or the Done button (on the iPad) to close the viewer and return to the message.

Once you’ve opened an attached document in another app, that app stores a copy of the document in its silo. You can now delete the e-mail message and the attached document if necessary; the copy of the document that you’ve added to the other app’s silo remains unaffected.

This is all pretty workable. The main disadvantage of transferring documents via e-mail is that it can choke both mail servers and inboxes. This means it’s most effective for transferring documents you know the recipient needs rather than showering the user with a smorgasbord of documents from which the user needs only one or two.

NOTE: If you attach a picture to an e-mail message, the recipient can save the picture to the Photos silo on the iPad or iPhone But if you attack a music file or video file, the recipient can only play it in the viewer or add it to third-party apps that handle media file types, not add it to the iPod silo on the device.

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