
Stop sending .DOC files as mail attachments There is a better way - Garbage
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/03/the-magic-of-editable-pdfs/index.htm
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bitboxer
Or even better: just send the damn text WITHIN the actual email. You know,
just how sane people do this :) .

~~~
gaius
You might be surprised how many people simply won't read a long email, their
eyes sort of glaze over, but will happily read a much longer document when the
email just says "please see attached". It's like flipping a mental switch
between "short note" and "real document".

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irahul
How about attaching text files then?

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gaius
RTF files are more likely; "normal" users have come to take formatting for
granted.

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icebraining
It's a shame we don't use HTML for most office documents. Readers are
ubiquitous, they degrade nicely in older/slower machines, they're open, etc.

PDF are supposedly better for printing, but that's only if you need documents
to come out exactly the same everywhere; for most, a slight difference in text
reflowing doesn't really make a difference, and CSS does the rest for the most
part.

There's also the problem with embedding content, but nowadays you can just use
data:// URIs and put everything in one file.

~~~
eli
PDF is _definitely_ better for printing. HTML is not so hot for docs that use,
say, page numbering.

Plus, imagine for a second that you are not already an HTML whiz. Now in order
to edit the HTML doc I sent you, you need to buy expensive, crappy WYSIWYG
editing software like Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

~~~
icebraining
_Plus, imagine for a second that you are not already an HTML whiz. Now in
order to edit the HTML doc I sent you, you need to buy expensive, crappy
WYSIWYG editing software like Frontpage or Dreamweaver._

Word can actually open and edit HTML documents; the problem is that the
support is shitty, particularly because they don't treat it as a normal
document. But that was my point: it's a shame HTML is a second class citizen
in office land.

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buster
Actually, at work i try to send restructuredText + a neatly generated .pdf.
Looks better, is easily editable.

As one of the few Linux/LibreOffice users i HATE(HATEHATEHATEHATE) .doc and
especially .docx. It's a nightmare to work with and collaborate on it between
MS Word and LibreOffice Writer. Something always gets screwed up.

Please, Office people in the world: Uninstall the nightmare that is called MS
Office. LibreOffice will do everything you will ever (everevereverever) need.

And if it doesn't have to be WYSIWYG: restructuredText is a pretty, awesome,
lightweight, cross platform, easily editable solution to a lot of crap that i
can find in my inbox (including rst2pdf and rst2odt and rst2html, etc etc ;)
).

~~~
icecreamguy
I have to vigorously disagree. I used OpenOffice exclusively my entire college
career and am an avid LibreOffice user now, however you are simply incorrect
when you state that LibreOffice comes even close to MS Office. If you're going
to say that LibreOffice smacks MS Office then I'm going to posit that you have
never used a pivot table in Calc, and that you do not work in a corporate
environment. In addition, for the 10 years that I have used Open/LibreOffice,
I have not once had a problem opening any of the hundreds of .doc and .docx
files sent to me via email.

~~~
dfc
In addition to pivot tables do not forget trying to do anything with MS
Access. I have also noticed that opening powerpoint presentations can grind LO
to a halt. Most recently the Stream Ciphers lecture from Boneh's class took
forever to open in LO on a 6 core AMD with 8 gigs of ram...

I agree that most of the time opening .doc/.docx with OO/LO is problem free.
But you never used StarOffice, back in the day things were not always so
easy:) Plus StarOffice was not guaranteed to stay open;)

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ilaksh
Wow there is an amazing amount of animated advercrap on that page.

~~~
vegardx
Had the same feeling. Not taking any advice from anyone that would even think
to write on a site like that. Heck, they even had a "loading page", what the
fuck?

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darxius
Weird. I wrote this (almost) exact article last week. I brought up much of the
same posts and it got a decent amount of votes too (got up to the front page).

[http://maxmackie.com/2012/03/19/Stop-distributing-.doc-
files...](http://maxmackie.com/2012/03/19/Stop-distributing-.doc-files/)

I wonder if he read my article...

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JohnnyFlash
So the message is. Lets all switch to LibreOffice!

Seems like nonsense to me. If you are running Windows, which most people are,
you are almost certainly going to have Word / Wordpad etc.

A far better solution to .doc attachments is to ask if your content really
needs to be in an attachment. A lot of the time it simply doesn't.

To be honest though this isn't really a problem is it? When Microsoft first
brought out their .docx format it seemed like there was a lag before other
free applications could read the files. I found that a problem.

Today, everyone has an application to open a .doc file. A lot of people are
using gmail. I just click the preview button. I assume that Windows Live Mail
has something like this which makes use of Office365 functionality (might be
wrong on this). It really is a non-issue.

~~~
DanBC
MS Word is expensive. MS Office is even more expensive. Many people don't need
all the features and would be fine with Abiword / Gnumeric or LibreOffice.
(I'm interested in what features MS Office has that are not available in
LibreOffice. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentions pivot tables. What
else?)

Many organisations would do well to save money on MS Office installations and
switch to LibreOffice. (Hopefully LibreOffice will get some designers to help
with the interface, and writers to help with the documentation.)

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ilaksh
Editable PDF files are better than .DOC? Wow.

Please don't send me an editable PDF instead of a DOC. wtf. PDF files are
designed to load slow and make my hard disk thrash.

If you send me a DOC at least I can edit it in google docs..

Much better send me a link to a google doc or some other online document..
zoho or whatever

~~~
masklinn
> PDF files are designed to load slow and make my hard disk thrash.

You are aware you don't _have_ to use Adobe software to read PDFs right? I've
got 7+MB PDF _books_ (as in 500 pages or so), OSX's Preview loads them in a
fraction of a second. Even "The Macintosh Way" (40MB of scanned images) takes
barely half a second. That's not enough time to start an empty instance of
Word

~~~
jamesgeck0
Or, on Windows, Sumatra PDF is lightweight and works well for most of the
documents I come across.

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codesuela
or use Google Documents instead of Hybrid PDFs where again you need
LibreOffice to edit them.

~~~
darklajid
Never used Google Docs. Don't you, in that case, require

a) that I have a Google account (not sure)

and

b) limit my access to the document that you sent me to times when I'm online
(unless I go ahead and export it to another format and save it locally.
Probably as text or pdf, depending on whether I want to edit or read)?

I assume b) is a given. If a) is true as well then I'd consider sending Google
Docs links just as rude as .doc etc.

~~~
mayanksinghal
a) I think, depends on the level at which the document is shared. If it is
public, anyone can find using search and edit it. If it is accessible to
anyone with the document link, then anyone who can discover the document can
edit it. If it is shared with a list of people (or a group) then you need to
login to authenticate yourself. The last is, I believe, the only solution to
the problem.

I don't think there exists a ubiquitous solution for sharing printable-well-
formatted documents that require no special skills for formatting. .DOC will
require the person on the other end to have MS Word and .ODT Libre Office
(which is no way good enough for anything ATM). There are also other
replacements to Google Docs, I haven't tried any as Google Docs fulfilled most
of the requirements of my minimal collaborative editing but I am told that
Zoho works really well.

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timrogers
Such crap. This only gets voted up because it bashes Microsoft.

~~~
bo1024
I disagree. This kind of thing is a real annoyance/problem for a lot of
people. Same goes for powerpoint slides.

It doesn't matter where you put blame, or if there's any blame at all; it's
still a problem.

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chrisacky
Are you kidding me. I would love .DOC since Whenever I get documents from
family (especially the Mum!) they send my .DOCX

Despite telling them hundreds of times to stop!

~~~
freehunter
Are we still hung up on .docx? Older versions of Word have compatibility to
convert them, and LibreOffice and Google Docs can open them. Instead of trying
to get them to always remember to save in another format, why not tell them
how to change the default saving format?

Changing every time is a pain, since Word has a dozen different options (Word
95, Word 98, Word 2000/2003, .docx, rtf, txt, etc). It gets confusing.

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af3
No, I won't stop. There is nothing better than Word to collaboratively work on
a manuscript in a research environment. Yes, this is "Editing - Emailing -
Editing" cycle, but no one has suggested anything better that actually works.

~~~
nagrom
I do research in physics. Typically we use git and latex. That's because it is
easy to branch out and change the structure of the document, you can include
the scripts and data used to generate data in the same repository and there's
a nice, easy-to-use front end in Github.

You get most of the features of word, and the math looks better. And it's
platform-agnostic! It doesn't matter whether you make that document on
Windows, Mac or Linux, and it doesn't matter which software you use either.
And cross-linking in the document is easy and a file-based database can be
used to store the bibliography.

Word is very hard to you use once you get used to that system...it's too
inflexible and a complicated document gets mangled when crossing the OS
boundary.

~~~
zerostar07
The fact is that it's much harder to train people who haven't had programming
experience (e.g. biologists or medical doctors) to use this stuff. Word does
the same thing pretty well (better imho, the reviews interface is intuitive),
and has plenty of citation managers too

~~~
_delirium
It's also close to impossible if the journal or conference doesn't give you a
LaTeX stylesheet, which is uncommon outside physics/math/CS. Sure, you _can_
in principle produce your own stylesheet conforming to the formatting
requirements, but even most seasoned LaTeX users find the stylesheet language
to be black magic (I dread having to make even minor edits to a stylesheet).

Matching citation styles used to be a problem also, but tools like Jurabib and
Biber have mostly solved that problem.

