Pet Peeve: Unnecessary Word Docs
I can’t stand it when people email me Word (or [insert your word processor of choice here]) documents with contents that would be just as meaningful if sent as plain text in an email (or better yet, in a wiki). It adds a whole step for me to get at the information, wastes bandwidth and disk space, and continues to create the illusion that we all need these bloated apps for basic communication and information exchange. I suppose that the suckiness of Notepad on Windows and the un-usability of <textareas> are partially to blame for this behavior.
June 27th, 2005 at 8:44 pm
I turned in my formal resignation at work today. As requested, I sent it in the form of a Word document attached to an email. It was stupid, although it did allow me to crack a joke in the email without compromising the formal tone of the letter. HR may have wanted it that way so they could print and file a paper copy, but our emails look like well-designed momos when they’re printed.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Last link broken (?); here’s a working link.
I agree that Word documents suck. I have a practice of writing junk in Markdown-formatted text, but if it’s for the job I usually have to export it as HTML and import it into my “house style” Word template — a lovely practice which removes, rather than adds, value. However, one could argue that a wiki page does the same. Plain text is good
See also: Stallman on the same topic.
June 28th, 2005 at 5:24 am
I agree! I don’t see the reason and hate the extra work it takes. If I need to save something I can do the cut and paste that is needed.
August 11th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
University of Pittsburgh’s computer lab division has pretty severely restricted hours this time of year—being between terms, of the seven labs on campus, only the one in the library is open this month, and the library itself is only open 830–5pm. But in order to find this out online, you have to dig through www.technology.pitt.edu to find the labs page, and then. . . . the hours are posted in PDF and DOC files, but not on the html page. WTF?
I can understand the PDF part—people may want to print themselves copies (though of course they can do that from HTML, too, but anyway…), and they can just tell the labs to print off copies to post, but why the DOCs? What could possibly be the point of that?