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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?"
For me at least, it depends. On the one hand, many people I work with distribute things in Word format because it's the standard in the organization. I usually just open the files in OpenOffice, and although every once in a while some complex formatting makes a document illegible, it is rare enough that I don't worry about it.
For people who are not in a position to force me to accept their acceptance of Microsoft, I try my best to educate them. The trick is to be polite about it. Most people don't understand, and quite a few will jump at the chance to save $300 by using OpenOffice. The trick is to find their "button".
I dont like the "Evil empire" any more than you do, but get over it.
It is as ubiquitous as PDF. Why are you not raving about PDF ??
You can get a free DOC viewer here or use OO.
Personally I use OO and it rocks.
If I resend a document I always convert it to rtf, txt, pdf, or another format to kind of send a hint.
I remember when I was that conceited. Then I realized, these people are just doing their fuckin' JOBS. They don't care about file formats or free software or Jesus H. Stallman.
.TXT? It's easier for my email program to search it."
.TXT pretty much all the time. Unless you work with complete computer neophytes, but if you are, .DOC is the least of your problems, eh?
... then I'll have to come up with something else..
So the line I use is "Hey, can you re-send that message after saving it as
Which is true. And business-goal-oriented. In fact once a couple co-workers figure out that you can in fact search your email folders for words and pull up old documents, they'll start sending
Or if new windows email programs start searching in Word attachments
Because as a user, I don't want my email service to be taking initative to change the content of my emails to be "safer". Guess what, I run Windows. I have Office. I use .doc files. I don't run OpenOffice, and I don't need my email provider giving me an .SXC instead, thank you very much. And I sure as hell don't want my text documents made into an image format.
.doc files, fine, I'll send you an RTF if you ask nicely. But the worst way to try to get someone to see your point of view is to force them.
In the position of an email provider, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be responsible for ensuring that all emails were "cleansed".
You don't want
...and that's all there is to it.
How in the world can someone make it to an upper-level CS class and still not have the basic skills it takes to discover what format a file extension stands for and go about finding an application that will open it?
Reminds me of when I was a TA in the CS dept. at my college. Students would regularly come to the help sessions with programs that wouldn't compile so I could more or less read the compiler's error and warning messages to them verbatim.
Student: "Why won't this compile?"
TA: "Well, let's try to compile it so I can see what's up. Oh, the compiler says that there's a parse error on line 40. So look at line 40 and see if you can find anything wrong."
Student: "Ummm. . . "
TA: "Look at the end of the line."
Student: "Oh look, I forgot a closing parenthesis."
Alls I can say is that if CS majors have problems like this with compiling C source, I have my doubts that the battle over file formats will ever amount to something more of a holy war where I'm doomed to fail but obligated to fight.
Mac OS X has made it incredibly simple to send documents in an open format with the "Save as PDF" function that is available any time you print.
This feature is part of the system install and not an add-on.
Now that people can create PDFs the same way they print, I am seeing a lot less of the ".doc-type" documents flying around as attachments.
Instead of running up the anti-MS flag, I usually take the tack of telling them that I got the file, but it looks all messed up on my screen. This is using the fact that people expect MS products (Windows, Office) to have "issues" to plant the seed of doubt that their attachments are being received correctly.
Or, for documents where it is apropos, I mention that the author should consider sending the document out in a format that is not easily edited.
If you show people a simple method (eg - as simple as printing) to guarantee* their documents will look the same on every computer and can not be modified, I have found that they often use it.
- Tony
* guarantee not a guarantee
If they don't resend the document, you'll know it wasn't important anyway. :-)
He got the integer value(32bits) of four ascii characters("1234", 8 bits each) Don't if his number is correct or not though.
I tried posting a story earlier this year on Slashdot about starting an OpenOffice Coup. The idea would be to start sending out OpenOffice documents to people instead of .doc and .xls files. When they complain, just tell them that OpenOffice is freely available, and they should download it to read your document/spreadsheet. Might be something to try in the future. Honestly, though, I'm tired of people sending me .doc files when a .pdf would convery the information just fine. :)