Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [44]
British government officials learned this the hard way several years ago. The “dodgy dossier,” a Word document containing information that helped justify the government’s support of the Iraq war, was sent around to journalists in early 2003. Some enterprising journalist opened the document in a text editor (or had a techie friend do so) and found the names of several unpublished authors of the report. This brought about more controversy, and as the BBC reported in August 2003, “The UK government has now largely abandoned Microsoft Word for documents that become public and has turned to documents created using Adobe Acrobat which uses the Portable Data Format (PDF).”29 The same article reports that Word files can contain, without the user’s knowledge, “the names of document authors, their relationship to each other, earlier versions of documents...[and] occasionally, very personal information such as social security numbers...[and] useful information about the internal network the document travelled through, which could be useful to anyone looking for a route into a network.” These are significant risks to run just to create some text.
Text formats: PDF
The article above mentions one other choice for text formats: Adobe’s PDF, or Portable Document Format, with the extension .pdf. If a document needs to be created in Word, PDF can contain the data without the accompanying problems of hidden data and incompatibility. In fact any application that has a Print command—not just Word—can turn its documents into a PDF.30 PDF’s biggest advantage is shareability: any Mac, Windows, or Linux PC can open and read PDF files without having to buy any special software. Even if the document was created in Word, and the recipient doesn’t own Word, the PDF will still be accessible. Moreover, PDF documents look just as good as documents in Word or any other application, both on screen and on paper; there’s no degradation of quality. This means that any application can create shareable documents, as long as you save the document in PDF. The only drawback of PDF files is that they’re read-only, not editable, by recipients. (There are ways of creating editable PDF files, but they require special software.)
Finally, it’s worth noting that PDF is a format owned by a corporation—Adobe—which so far hasn’t shown any desire to “lock in” or otherwise charge customers for access to the format. (No wonder PDF is so popular.) As long as the recipient doesn’t need to edit the file, PDF is a good alternative to Word.
Text formats: final review
Here is a review of which file formats to use when creating digital text:
If the document doesn’t need to be printed, use a text editor to create an ASCII file. If the text needs to be e-mailed, put it in the body of an e-mail—but don’t attach it. (Even if the text does need to be printed, ASCII could be an appropriate choice. Since ASCII doesn’t include any font or style data, the printed text will look like what comes out of a typewriter, but that might be acceptable. Only if the text needs to look “pretty” on paper should you consider using Word or an equivalent tool.)
If the document will be printed, and it needs to look “pretty” with formatting and other print-related features, then use Word or an equivalent tool, like Google Docs, to create it. (Advanced users may prefer a professional-grade tool, like Adobe InDesign, for documents that need special formatting or layout.) But share the document in PDF. Only if the recipient needs to edit the file should you share the file in its original (Word) format. Just remember that Word files may contain hidden data and could be incompatible with any previous version of Word that recipients may be using.
Finally, note that there are other common document formats that are useful to know. Web pages are best created in HTML, databases in FileMaker, spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet, and slideshows in Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint. (The “more essentials” chapter revisits these.) For the most part, though, bit-literate users