How to attach a file using Google Mail

The topic of this discussion is attaching a file- a document, picture, or anything but a computer program (called an executable).  I'm using Google Mail as the email application, but the instructions are generally useful in any email application.

First, start an email message (Compose).
In the resulting email window, you will find an icon that is a paper clip, or it may say something like "Add Attachment" or "Add a File".  In Google, this is found right under the subject field.

Click once on it.  The result is a the standard Windows dialog box used to navigate to the file.  In general, For example:

1. Browse through your files and click the name of the file you'd like to attach.
2. Click Open.

To attach multiple files, hold the command (Mac) or Ctrl (PC) key while selecting your files, or click Attach another file.

The email program will go through the upload process and it may ask you to select the files you want attached from a list of uploaded files. Or it may just finish and the files are attached.  Google Mail does the latter.

Specifically, suppose you wanted to attach a file that was on a flash drive.  In the left pane of the "pick a file" dialog, scroll up and down until you come to "Computer".  If you just see "Computer" and nothing indented under that, click on the arrow in front of computer to expose the list of all things "computer."  For example:

The key here is to identify your flash drive from this list. I know the name of the drive because I name every flash drive (a topic for another discussion).  In this case, it is DGL16GSAFE.  If you don't know the name of your flash drive, you will have to eliminate as many drives as you can and then click on each one of the remainder in succession until you find the one that has the file you want to attach.  Remember that you may have stored the file in a folder on the flash drive, so you'll have to know the name of the folder or take the time to explore every folder on the flash drive.  

In the above picture, I can eliminate drives C, E, M, and SharedDocs because they are "obviously" not flash drives. Then, if I didn't know L was the drive with my file (or files), I'd have to click on each one until I found the drive with the files.  

Any questions?  Ask in the comments field below.