Posting documents for web in Word format ...... and defending the decision
Thu, 06/17/2010 - 1:34pm
Recently I blogged about a press release that was issued in a Microsoft Word format. Touching on a article I found on OpenSourceCatholic, I mentioned even the Vatican says Thou shalt not use proprietary formats. The defense?
Regarding your comment on needing $150 Microsoft Word to open the press release, you forget that ALL versions of Windows include "Wordpad," which opens Word documents. While we normally use PDFs, we used a document format so others (like you) would not have retype the information.
A little Microsoft-centric....
Thu, 06/17/2010 - 7:38pm
#2
Agreed, though it's difficult
I agree with you both; however, it still is a tricky issue, since everyone is using Word. It seems none of the WYSIWYGs do a perfect job pasting from Word. Marginal, at best. Pasting as plain text does help, but when importing lots of formatted content, it gets cumbersome fast.
The problem with his (your commenter's) argument is that PDFs can also be easily copied from... and, while Mac users have TextEdit for basic Word document viewing use, and PC users have Wordpad, which can do about the same, the documents add so much extraneous junk to the text itself that it's really not (in my opinion) worth bothering with Word (or even a PDF).
Put the text on the web, in plain text format... maybe with a little strong or emphasis here or there, and let people go crazy with it. Much easier to put plain text into an RSS feed, aggregated via Facebook, searched via Google and on-site search, and downloadable by anyone, anywhere, any time.
Heck, the bandwidth savings alone from switching from downloadable PDFs and Word documents to text on the web would save millions a year!
Advancing the faith.