I got an e-mail from someone not too long ago, and each of the quotation marks was a three-character string of gobbledegook. Once you send outside of your organization and across the internet, then these The good news is that while everything I’ve said still applies, problems are slightly less when the email stays within an organization. These cases, you’re pretty much out of luck. Certain types of communication require certain forms. If that culture is “send everything in Word”, I naturallyĮncourage you to work to change that culture if you can. I will throw out one last caveat: in some organizations, culture may dictate In fact, there’s every reason to avoid it. Then there’s simply no reason to drag an application such as Word into the If your message requires a very formal presentation (mostĭo not), or it requires features or functionality found in Word (mostīut if your message is only going to live or be viewed primarily in email – Some point be printed or published in some form, a Word document might beĪppropriate. When you are, perhaps, collaborating on a document, or passing aĭocument around to be read or reviewed. In my opinion, Word is only called for when you are actually working on aĭocument. I’m simply talking about the tools used to contain your message. And I’m not even talkingĪbout making your message smaller, say using fewer words (though that’s good Nuts with formatting or tables or pictures … just say what needs saying andĪ smaller, faster message is much more likely to be delivered and read thanĪ bloated, slow attachment in Word. You’ll stand a much better of getting your message across.ĩ times out of 10 the right thing to do is to simply put your message into Often used in ways that detract from the message. Word’s formatting abilities, while also making the document even bigger, are Revisions, is easily accessible to anyone. Previously deleted information possibly including old comments, notes and prior When “Fast Save” isĮnabled in Word, deleted information is not necessarily deleted from theĭocument, it’s merely marked as “don’t show this”. You run the risk of unintentional leaks of information. Message is just another barrier to getting your message read. Your recipient open and run this large application in order to view your The message will be significantly slower to open. Slow down networks and generally waste communications resources on the And, larger emails take longer to deliver, Why do we care about size? Ever had your hard disk run out of room? By sending around oversized documents you’re forcing
Paragraph, a little over 40 words or around 250 characters resulted in a Wordĭocument over 20,000 bytes in size. Often much bigger than the message they contain. The message will be significantly larger than it needs to be. Potential virus, even if they are neither.
Particularly Word documents, are more likely to be filtered as spam or as a Your recipient may never get the message. Besides, why put up anĪdditional barrier when you don’t need to? Uninterested in taking the time to figure out how. There are ways around it, but many recipients don’t know how, or are Proliferation of viruses in Word documents, many mail programs don’t allow Wordĭocuments to be opened directly, or in some cases, even saved to disk. Your recipient may not be able to open the attachment. With handheld devices such as Treo’s or Blackberry’s becoming more and moreĬonnected, this is an increasingly frequent occurrence. I often read email on my cell phone, and Word documents are promptly ignored. Your recipient may not have Word, or a program that can read Word documents.
Unfortunately it’s too easy to come to rely on Word for everything. It’s feature rich (perhaps too much so), incredibly powerful, andĪbsolutely the right tool for creating good looking printed documents. Word is a wonderful word-processing program. Problems looks like this: you write a message in Word, you save that message toĭisk, and you then attach that resulting Word “.doc” document to an email which It’s the wrong thing to do for many of the same reasons listed below, that’sĪctually not what I’m talking about here. It’s a simple setting, and while I also believe
Let me first be clear: I know that a lot of folks use Word as their emailĮditor in Microsoft Outlook. That place is not as an attachment to email. That I’m often that “someone from outside the organization”.ĭon’t get me wrong, Microsoft Word has it’s place. It’s something I feel fairly strongly about.