Thursday, November 02, 2006
What’s the Word on the Street?
Isn’t it depressing the way many of us presume that everyone has a copy of Microsoft Word?
A colleague of mine was sent a document unreadable by his copy of MS Word. The extension was .wps. The author claimed that it would open with WordPad (the free text editor that comes with Windows), well it didn’t open this file. On further inspection we came to the conclusion that this file was born of Microsoft Works. But not of the recent variety because that comes with Microsoft Word (see here). On further research here this .wps file is certainly a Works document but you need an extension for Microsoft Word to open it.
The point is though, we shouldn’t presume that everyone has Microsoft Word.
furthermore...
I have complained to colleagues about provided links to Word documents on the web because, we need to have a copy of MS Word to view those documents. Also, Word document can, potentially, include viruses.
What to do? Within an organisation, it seems OK to distribute Word docs with email as attachments, but making them pubilcally available via the web is just not on!
What are the options?
Well, it all depends on what level of collaboration we are wanting. If you merely want to provide something for someone to read, then you could:
- make it into a web page
- make a PDF
- include the text in an email
If you are looking for the file to be edited and returned, then how about using Word and exporting (use 'Save as...') Rich Text Format (RTF). RTF can be read by most word processing software across all platforms.
Adobe PDF will preserve the look of the document but the 're-editing' options are limited.
How about Word document readers?
For Windows PCs, you can download a Word viewer from Microsoft, but there are others. Adrian van Os gives us a great resource full of versions for every possible platform.
There is also an online viewer for Word here but then you are still delivering over the web, and this has its virus risks.
