Attachments Considered Harmful

I hate it when I receive something like a party invitation as an attachment in some proprietary format. (Actually, I hate attachments in general, but I'll save that for another day. And in case you don't catch the reference to "considered harmful" you might check this piece from the 1960's.)

I don't make you use my software. Don't make me use yours.

I don't use MS Office and I don't think that you should either. If you send documents in any proprietary format, be it MS Word, Wordperfect, or Wordstar, you are requiring those who receive your document to own that software. Even sending documents in a publicly documented open format like the Open Document Format for Office Applications still requires that people have access to an application that they might not have. Some people take a more radical stance on this than do I. I don't think they're wrong, but I don't want you to think I'm crazy.

What's so important about your formatting?

I recently received an attachment that was over 200K that, I'm told, is a party invitation. The salient information about where and when the party is can be represented quite well in 1/1000th of that space. Sure, it no longer takes that long to download 200K if you are using a computer with a high-speed connection. If you have a dial-up connection it can be annoying. If you are some uber-geek using a PDA to read your mail or are vision impaired, the message you have sent with your pretty invitation is worthless.

Most documents you send don't need to be edited.

Often what is sent as a word processing document is information that no longer needs to be processed. So when someone opens it they might change it by mistake (or if they use a different version of the program than you do, it might not look like you had intended). If you are sending out a document for which the formatting is very important, a PDF is a much more reliable way to communicate that information.

Creating PDFs is easy and does not require any proprietary software. Here are some ways to create PDF documents:

• Use OpenOffice.org. In each application, there's a PDF icon right next to the printer.
• Use Mac OS X. The print dialog has a button that says something like "create a PDF."
• Install PDFCreator. After you do you can choose PDF Creator like you would any other printer. If you know how to print and know how to save files, you can use this program.