Technology for Academics

Last month I wrote about electronic grading. With regard to saving the assignment files from students I said, “The papers themselves are saved to a ‘Student papers’ folder in ‘My Documents.’ Each file I save is renamed with standard nomenclature: Student last name, assignment, and whether the assignment was turned in late.” Of course what that means is saving each incoming file individually.

I now have a better option. EZDetach, a TechHit product. With two mouse clicks, all of the files attached to email messages in a given folder are saved to a My Documents subfolder, and they even have helpful filenames.

As I wrote in that earlier blog post, as assignment emails come in from students, I move the files into a “grade these” folder in Outlook. Using EZDetach, when I’m ready, I can detach all of the files at once.

EZDetach adds an unobtrusive icon to your Outlook toolbar. Go to the file folder where you’ve saved your student assignment email. Select the messages that contain the files you want to detach by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on each message. If you want to detach them all, there’s no need to select any.

Click the EZDetach icon, and the EZDetach pop-up window appears. (See the screenshot below.) Clicking the option button gives you the options menu.

Process Attachments in. Choose whether you want to save the attachments from just the email that you have selected or if you want to do it for all of the email in that folder.

Destination Folder. Browse to the folder where you want to save your files. If you have already used EZDetach, it will remember the last folder you chose. Clicking the down arrow will give you a list of the folders you’ve chosen in the past.

Options. Click the options button to expand the options menu. Now you can decide how you would like to name your files and how you’d like to your subfolder if you’d like the files to be moved to a subfolder.

For example, in the screenshot below, I’ve asked EZDetach to add the name of the sender and the sender’s email address to the filename, and to not create a separate subfolder to house the files.

Let’s say that I received these email messages with these files attached:

Wonder Woman (Wonder.Woman@marvel.com) Assignment1.docx
Spiderman (spidey@marvel.com) Homework.wps
Captain America (CaptAmer@marvel.com) psychhw.doc

I click the EZDetach icon, and when the popup window appears, I click Save Now. EZDetach will do the rest. With the settings I have chosen in the screenshot, EZDetach will save the files to my Student Papers folder in My Documents. The files will be named:

Wonder Woman – Wonder.Woman@marvel.com – Assignment1.docx
Spiderman – spidey@marvel.com – Homework.wps
Captain America – CaptAmer@marvel.com – psychhw.doc

EZDetach truly is easy to use. Try it 30 days for free. If it’s a big time saver for you, it’s $39.95 to purchase.