Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [42]
Two decades later, Word remains much the same program. Although it has many more features, at its heart Word is still a tool designed to create paper printouts of formatted text. It’s no coincidence that, in some versions of Word, the first thing users see when opening a new document is a pair of inch-scale rulers on the top and left of the screen. The rulers refer only to the length of the sheet of paper that will be printed. It’s an anachronism in the digital age.25
Admittedly, global corporations print more paper today than ever before. Often this is due to the lack of bit literacy training; sometimes users print because they don’t know how to organize digital files or share them online. Like other unproductive practices discussed in earlier chapters, these will naturally be resolved as more users begin to practice bit literacy. A completely “paperless office” is probably unachievable for most companies, but they certainly can reduce their paper consumption from current levels.
In the meantime, there are exceptional situations when text does need to be printed on paper. The most common instance I see of this is the legal contract, which needs to be printed in order to get a signature. The sections and sub-sections of contractual language also lend themselves to Word’s formatting abilities, and most lawyers tend not to work much with other tools. But beyond such exceptions, there is little reason for average users to turn their digital text into paper. Creating and sharing text in bits is faster, easier, cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and overall better than churning out pressed trees and chemicals. In the digital age, Word is usually the wrong choice for text.
Another problem with Word is its multiple incompatible versions. It’s most accurate to talk about Word document formats, since every new version of Word (arriving, it seems, every couple of years) comes with its own, slightly different Word file format. Previous versions of Word are unable to open files in newer Word formats, giving customers a strong motivation to buy upgraded versions of Word, regardless of whether they actually want any of the new features. Microsoft has used this “lock-in” effect for years to help sell millions of copies of Office, the “productivity suite” that includes Word. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the newly released Office 2007: “Microsoft has also changed the standard file format for Office files. Older versions of Office, on both Windows and Macintosh computers, won’t be able to read these new file types without special conversion software.”26
This raises the question of what is the best file format for digital text. If Word documents are bloated and inefficient, what’s the alternative? Users need something more specific than “text in the body of an e-mail,” especially since a lot of text is created outside e-mail. Fortunately, users have just such a format. In fact they’ve always had it, as long as computers have existed. It’s called ASCII.
Text formats: ASCII
ASCII, pronounced “ASK-ee,” corresponds roughly to the letters, digits, and symbols on a computer keyboard: a through z, in both lowercase and uppercase, digits 0 through 9, and most standard punctuation marks. Text created from these characters is known as ASCII text, and any file comprised only of ASCII characters is an ASCII file. (The meaning of the acronym ASCII isn’t important, but in case you want to impress a techie, it stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.)
ASCII is the simplest possible text format because it’s made up of text characters only. (For that reason, ASCII is also known as “plaintext.”) ASCII files contain no fonts, styles, colors, or formatting—just the text. That’s why an ASCII message is so much smaller than a Word document containing the same text; Word documents include print-related data.
ASCII also predates Microsoft Word, having been developed