Grassroots Response to .doc E-mail Attachments?

LurkingAbout asks: "Maybe it's just me, but it feels like people are sending Word .doc files as attachments more then ever. Typically it's a friendly acquaintance who doesn't realize that .doc is one of Microsoft's ploys to force the few remaining holdouts, like me, to shell out for a copy of Word (or better yet Office). This morning it was the director of my daughter's preschool with the monthly parent newsletter. I've taken to responding with a polite-but-educational message requesting that the sender save the file as RTF or HTML and resend. If I'm feeling long winded I sometimes go into a diatribe about the Evil Empire. Today I started thinking that maybe there's an opportunity for some grassroots organization here. Maybe a concise well-written boilerplate paragraph for just this situation? Or a link to a web page to help educate the masses who think .doc is like air. What do other Slashdot readers do in this situation?"

Comments

Give up

[lambent]

I tried. Many times, with many people. Some converted, some ignored me.

I don't bother anymore for just casual acquaintances i'll never speak to again. I just run it through antiword (http://www.winfield.demon.nl).

Am I a traitor? Meh. Preaching to the choir, as well as the deaf (whether purposefully so, or they're just too belligerently stupid to bother paying attention) is a waste of my time as well as theirs.

I recently trolled my old high school's website. Most of all their information to parents and students, including forms neccessary for graduation, are .DOC files.

At any rate, remember: revision tracking is good for a quick laugh when you've got the proprietary-file-format blues.

It's easy to make them paranoid about using DOC

[stienman]

"Dear Sir or Madam,

Recently you sent an email containing a Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint Document. Due to security and virus concerns [our company] cannot accept those attachments.

Please use HTML, RTF, PDF, or regular text to transmit future documents to me. It will be necessary for you to retransmit this document in an acceptable format.

If the need is urgent and you are unable to convert it to an acceptable format please fax short documents to xxx-yyy-zzzz. Please call for arrangements to transmit documents with more than 20 pages.

Thank you for your time.

-Adam"

Re:It's easy to make them paranoid about using DOC

[DrSkwid]

Thing is, if the person who sent it to you *does* know about computers, they will know you are a tool.

Try and convince me that there have _never_ been exploits via html & pdf.

Here's the latest PDF one.

Did you know that Melissa and Goga were originally delivered via RTF ?

Re:Nobody's forcing you to buy word.

[eakerin]

Fine, then I'll just start sending all my documents in .sxw format. Then you can just quit whining and go download the free Open Office viewer/editor.

All good right?

Re:heh ? get over it

[Curtman]

It is as ubiquitous as PDF. Why are you not raving about PDF ??

The problem isn't that .doc is ubiquitous, its that its obfuscated. The PDF format isn't a secret, the documentation for it is massive. There's no secrets there.

Re:Arrrrghh!

[jc42]

Doesn't this sound a bit rude? ... Deal with it.

It could be a lot more serious than that. Here's a reply that I've found fairly effective in a few such cases:

You have sent a document in Microsoft's Word format. Such
documents may now contain text encoded in forms that are
patented by Microsoft. Decoding and reading such a document
on a non-Microsoft system or with non-Microsoft software
may subject the reader to criminal charges and/or large
fines for patent enfringement.

Please re-send the document in a format that won't result
in such criminal charges and/or fines if I read it.

This isn't a joke. Decoding proprietary formats can land you in serious trouble in the US and a number of other countries, if the format's owner decides to enforce the laws.

Maybe the courts wouldn't enforce such things. Do you really want to be a test case? If you do, well, I'll cheer you on.

My e-mail sig

[PeekabooCaribou]

My signature on all outgoing mails is my name, e-mail address, some info from uname, and a link to Jeff Goldberg's "MS-Word is Not a document exchange format." I don't know how many people actually read it, but at least it's something.

It's the way windows works

[wowbagger]

The reason folks use DOC is because of the way Windows works.

Case in point:

I am working with a customer who is having problems interfacing to our equipment over GPIB. He is having a problem, and is running the GPIB logger program to see what is going on.

So, he gets the fault on screen. He wants to send me the info. Rather than a) telling GPIBSpy to save the log data as text, or b) marking the text in the GPIBSpy window, then pasting it into the email message, he does things "The Windows Way" - he does an ALT-PRINTSCREEN, then opens Word, then does a paste, then File->Email. Boom - what should be a simple 5K file is now a 100K BMP inside a 200K Word document. And of course, now when I want to copy and paste the section of transaction that has a problem I cannot because it is no longer text but a BMP.

Ditto with our physical plant manager (the guy who's department changes the lights, moves the desks, and so on.) Everytime he wants to send a memo, what does he do - open email client, compose email, send?

NO. He does things "The Windows Way": Start Word. Open Template->Standard memo (which has a company logo graphic, so it will be large). Write memo (Please don't park in the west parking lot tomorrow - we will be spraying for weeds and we don't want to screw up the paint on your car). File->Email. Subject: Memo. Mail text: Please read the attached memo. Send to all users.

Microsoft has made it very easy to start all documents in Word. In a way, this is good - it makes it easier for the users. However, it also makes it HARDER to work with any document that is NOT a Word document. It also means that users are trained that all the world is a nail, since they are using the hammer of Word.

Take my domain www.no-doc.org

[Florian]

Several years ago, I wanted to start a grassroots campaign against MS Word as an exchange document format as well and registered the domain no-doc.org for that purpose. My idea was to gather wide-ranging support not only from computer programmers, but also from non-technical people like professional writers, and spread a "no-doc.org" logo (perhaps with a crossed-out Microsoft Word file icon) as a popular image on stickers, t-shirts, website banners etc..

However, I gave up on that project simply because, unlike for example in the case of gif vs. png images, there is no easy replacement to be advertised and offered to non-technical people:

• RTF is nothing but .doc in ASCII encoding, but otherwise it's also a format defined and controlled by Microsoft (and whose newer versions I believe are undocumented).
• .swx, the OpenOffice/StarOffice format is currently not supported by any other program.
• HTML doesn't preserve important formatting information like footnotes and is too inconsistently implemented across applications
• DocBook and LaTeX are semantically structured formats and hence not capable enough of supporting documents formatted with no structured semantics; you can use them to create output in other formats, but you can't automatically transform arbitrary formatting into them.
• PDF is a write-only format
• plain ASCII text offers not no formatting at all and is incompatible across platform/language-specific special character and CR/LF encoding

In other words, a format that is open across applications and platforms, sufficiently powerful in its encoding both of typographic (font settings etc.) and structural (footnotes etc.) layout and widely supported by mainstream word processors (and be it only everything but MS Word) doesn't exist. As long as this doesn't change, for example with OASIS' current efforts to standardize an open office document format or large cross-application support for the OpenOffice file format, any "no-doc" advocacy is elitist and doomed to alienate even people who might be sympathetic for political reasons.

But if anyone wants to seriously do a grassroots campaign against using Microsoft's proprietary file formats, I am happy to transfer the no-doc.org domain to them for free.