Enhancing Document Compatiblity

In order to enable other users to easily access files you create and plan to send via e-mail, please (try to) follow the following guidelines:

• Consider that not everybody owns a legal or illegal copy of the latest Microsoft Office Professional (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) for Windows XP; in fact, there are lots of users who know that this is not necesssarily the best choice. Assuming everybody can read documents created with these programs is no better than saying "just drag this document to Apple Works 6.2.9"
• Microsoft Word has the ability (!!) to save documents in alternative formats than the native .doc format:
  • Selecting "File/Save As..." (or similar) allows to save a document in Rich Text Format (.rtf), for example, which is easily readable on nearly all platforms with most word processing programs (as long as there are no graphics, tables or other specialties included).
  • For simple documents containing only plain text, saving as Plain Text (.txt) might also be a useful strategy.
  • To prevent problems with Windows users, make sure you include the proper extension (i.e., .txt, .rtf, .doc).
  • Short texts can even better be copied and pasted into an e-mail directly, without attaching a separate document! (This also reduces file sizes dramatically, by the way)

    Even if it is possible to open and read some documents, it is in most cases so much simpler to read the relevant information in a plain e-mail!

  • If the file contains tables etc., exporting it as an HTML file might be an option to consider (although Word creates terrible HTML code, the information can at least be displayed satisfactorily in most web browsers).
  • If it is really necessary to embed graphics and pictures in files (which it rarely is...), the best way is to create a PDF file (portable document format) - if you don't use Apple's Mac OSX, this requires either Adobe's Acrobat software or other free alternatives (more on that topic). However, this is not necessarily the way to go for documents containing only a few lines of text.
• Don't use 1MB Word documents to send 7 lines of text wrapped in 4 tables and 3 enumerations.
• Don't use 500kB Excel Sheets to send 5 number pairs.
• Don't use Powerpoint presentations to send jokes consisting of 3 text lines.
• Please, don't use megabyte-sized JPEG images to send scanned text pages, if there is not a really good reason to do so!! A screenshot of a Powerpoint presentation containing 8 words and 3 arrows (not joking...) is not a good reason!!
• (This is also true) If the information in an e-mail consists of 3 words, don't wrap them up in an attached Excel document!
• Think twice (or more) before pressing the Forward button when you receive one of those very funny jokes. Even leaving aside the fact that not everybody has Mbps high-speed internet connections, sorting, reading and deleting an e-mail is always time consuming, and might not always be worth it.
• The fact that Microsoft Office products are mentioned here so often is not related to the product itself, but to the statistical frequency of problems.

Further reading: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

The bottom line: Creating compatible documents which are readable to most others without hassles is actually a fairly simple process, which does not require expert computing skills, just a little good will...