Gmail offers great feature of viewing attachment.
Our traditional mailing system always ask us to download the attachment. Gmail has changed that completely.
To view Gmail attachments
Login to your Gmail account
Open the message that contains the attachment 
At the bottom of the message you will see the attachment with many options as shown below
- You can download all the Gmail attachments at once by clicking Download all attachments
- When you click that you will get all attachment in a zipped format
- If you want to download each attachment separately, click Download next to every attachment
- This will only download the specific attachment
Apart from downloading you can view all Gmail attachments without downloading
- You can view only the following attachments
- .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .sxw, .sxc, .sxi, .sdw, .sdc, .sdd, and .wml
- This means that your attachment will be converted into HTML and the HTML attachment will open in a new browser
- So you cannot view the zip file as HTML
This saves lot of time downloading and organizing your files
When you receive an attachment in Microsoft Excel (xls) format or Comma separated value (CSV) format, you can view those documents with Google spreadsheet and make any changes that you want to.
When you receive an Gmail attachment with Microsoft Document (Doc) format, you can view those documents with Google Documents. You can edit the changes that you want to.
Gmail will store this document in your Gmail account under Google document or Google spreadsheet.
Read more interesting topics from our website.
When clicking ‘download’ on a gmail attachment, it used to automatically open. Now it just puts it in the download file. I don’t get the dialog box anymore. How can I view the attachment first?
It is the setting of your browser to open the file instead of saving.
If it is Chrome find the “options” page and find the tab “under the hood” you will see Download section and choose “Ask where to save each file before downloading”