File Formats: .doc and beyond
May 12, 13:40 by Lorna
The Microsoft Word file format, .doc. Its wonderful, its comfortable, its familiar. When a file comes with an email on or a webpage, your PC knows which icon to display and how to show you the contents of the document. It can hold text, pictures, or whatever you like. So why am I writing this article at all? The truth is that Microsoft Word .doc format is designed for word processing. Because it can also do anything else you can think of (except the hoovering, so far), its a very big format and can only be read by Microsoft software [1].
So what else is out there?
The Online Paper Problem
Well for starters lets think about why we send documents electronically in the first place. Its quicker and easier than printing and posting them – that’s the main motivator. When you send something to someone that is supposed to be printed, how do you know it will appear correctly at their end? Their margins might be different, they might have a different version of Word, in some cases you might want the document to be unchanged before printing (this is something that always bothers me when recruiters will only accept my CV in Word format).
In this scenario, a good format is PDF (Portable Document Format). Its widely used on the internet and is perfect for anything which the user will simply either read or print, but which you’d like to be laid out as you intended. Manuals, reports, entry forms, anything you would have supplied on paper five years ago, these should be in PDF.
Most computers can read PDF – if you don’t already have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed then get it – its free! Outputting to PDF is a bit of a different story. There are a number of applications that you add just like a printer in Windows. You print your document to this printer in the normal way, but after you press Print, you will be prompted for a filename. Then, as if by magic, you .pdf file will appear. My preferred method of creating PDFs is to use the “Print to PDF” option that comes with Open Office these days, its great and its easy.
Sending images
We’ve all done this, the morning after that great even, downloaded all the photos onto the computer and prepared to send them to our daughter/father/cat/granny, but realised they’re a bit big and hard to see, all stuck in a directory like that. So you put together a Word document (or worse, a PowerPoint slideshow) and send it out to all your friends, shrinking the pictures down a bit on the way.
Here’s an alternative suggestion. Images come in files, right? From your camera they are probably .jpg (a format from the Joint Photographic Experts Group) but others might be .bmp (BitMaP) or .gif (Graphical Interchange Format) [3], depending how they were created. So why not just send me the files? If they’re a bit big then by all means they can be cropped or resized by whatever means [2], but all computers know how to display images so go for it!
Here’s a very alternative suggestion – put your photos online with a flickr account or something, and then just email the web address to your friends and family.
Excel Spreadsheets
This is a particular bugbear of mine. If you haven’t guessed by now, I don’t own a copy of Microsoft Office. If you are sending me some telephone numbers or a simple list of sports results which is in table layout, I don’t need the excel formatting or layout or anything, I just want the information you wanted to send me. For excel, the best way to produce data that can be read by pretty much anything, try saving your file as .csv (Comma Separated Values). You’ll see popup messages telling you the world will end … but anyone, with any software on their machines, will be able to see what it was that you wanted to show them.
In conclusion
I’m an idealist and I truly believe that there should be equality of information for everyone. Every file should be written such that it can be read by anyone, no matter what software they have or whether they need a screen reader, or what language they speak. If a few lines of text are all that is needed then perhaps a plain text (.txt) document would suffice. And if you need a heading and maybe a table or two, then save your document as .rtf (Rich Text Format), and share your goodness with the world.
So next time you come to create a file, don’t just click on the W icon, think about the information that actually needs to be transmitted, and choose accordingly.
1 not strictly true, there are free viewers available for most Microsoft Office file formats and Open Office will certainly do the trick.
2 don’t shell out a lot of money for a graphics package unless you are in the design industry – GIMP can probably do wht you are after
3 for anyone who thinks I should be educating the masses about the evils of .gif and the goodness that is .png, I’m saving that for another day.
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