Please, no DOC files! (was: Ralph's poetry)

Christoph J.W. Schmees cjws at gmx.de
Wed Mar 21 15:26:22 PST 2001


At 17:19 21.3.2001 -0500, you wrote:

>For all who may be interested, please open the attached flyer, which
>includes ordering information and a couple of excerpts.

Please let me quote a message posted to the list Nov. 15, 2000:

Dear all,

may I draw your attention to a never ending story. The title is:

"Two good reasons #not# to send documents in a proprietary file format."

Most users arent' aware of the risks they take, nor how easy the remedy is.
Let me contribute to a little more awareness and knowledge.

1.
*.DOC files may contain viruses. So chances are that you unintentionally
(well, let's hope that :-) help them spread. What do you think the receiver
will feel about you sender when he finds out how he got the virus? It may
even become a lawyer's case easily.
I myself never open a DOC file from unknown origin. You may call it
paranoia, I call it cautious. And it does pay off. In more than fifteen
years work with PCs, most of the time being responsible for many at the
same time, I never encountered a successful virus or troian horse attack.
Attempts there were. On the other hand I have seen several other people's
PCs having virus infections which I cleaned then.

2.
Does everyone own and use the latest version of word from Billieboy? The
answer is no. Again there are good reasons not to keep on hopping onto each
the newest version with many new errors. And there are other products from
other vendors out there which can easily compete, let alone other platforms
such as apple, linux, you name them. Since several years I cannot read the
latest DOC format, and the same may hold true for many other people as
well. So if you want to make your document accessible for your colleagues
outside the micro$oft mono culture, you'd best send it in a platform and
product independent format.

Now, what is the solution? Very simple. If you are aware, it is only few
mouse clicks away. "File", "store as..." opens a dialogue window. In the
lower left part this window offers a drop down list for "document type" (or
the like; I don't know the exact wording of the newest english dialogues).
 From that you choose "Rich Text Format (RTF)", then "ok". That procedure
yields a file 'documentname.RTF' (the file 'documentname.DOC' still
exists). The RTF
# can transport all of your layout and text formatting, is
# platform independent so everyone can read it, and
# transport of virusses definitely is impossible.

What more do you want?

Well, this approach exhibits one little drawback. If your document contains
graphics (drawings, pictures) it may become a rather large RTF file. The
cure for that is to compress (ZIP, RAR, ...) it before sending. Use one of
the many shareware or even freeware compressors available or a file manager
with built-in conpressing capability (WinCommand, Norton Commander, ...)

Ok, these were my two cents for a better world.

hth.

cu,
Christoph Schmees
Consultant and Trainer

*
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