Don't Send Word

I just got an email with a Word document attached. The document contained the only information that made the email worth opening, so I obviously had to open the attachment. It took maybe a full minute for Word to start up and show me the stupid document, I looked at it for all of 10 seconds just to make sure it said what I thought it said, and then I quit Word because it's such an awfully-written piece of bloatware that it slows my machine down if I leave it running in the background. For these reasons and others (e.g., many people don't have Word and it's a proprietary format, Word docs are larger than many other formats and therefore take longer to send and receive, etc.), Word attachments are a cruel and unnecessary form of communication. Instead of sending Word docs, please consider the following alternatives*:

• If you want to send information in email, send it in the body of the email whenever possible.
• If you created the information in Word, you can just copy and paste into your email.
• If you simply must send and attachment, Word also offers a nice feature called “Save As” that allows you to convert your document to plain text or rich text, either of which are preferable attachment formats (because they can be opened by just about any word processor).
• If your document contains tables or the formatting is important to its meaning somehow, the Mac OS allows you to save any document as a PDF, so if you're using a Mac, it's easy to attach a PDF instead of a Word doc, and the PDF will allow your recipient to see the document exactly as you created it.**
• If you're using Windows and don't have a simple means to create PDFs, use Word's handy “Save As” feature to create an HTML version of the document, then attach that. The HTML version can be opened in any browser (and probably by most email clients), so, again, it's a much more considerate and convenient form of communication.

*Possibly the only worse form of document attachment is the WordPerfect document; generally, the above tips apply to this format, as well. ** Of course, PDFs aren't a much better format than Word docs for many Windows users. Every time I use a Windows machine and need to view a PDF I'm dismayed anew at how poorly the system handles them. Even on a fast machine it takes forever to load the Adobe viewer so you can see the PDF. The Mac OS has a handy built-in PDF viewer called Preview that opens PDFs as fast as you can open a plain text document.

Posted January 18, 2005 06:28 AM | mac geek