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At my organization we regularly email Microsoft Word documents to oneanother as attachments. Meeting minutes, agendas, summaries, pretty muchanything other than really short messages get written in Word, and then sent asan attachment. I recently had someone from outside the organization claim that this was areally bad idea. He was quite adamant that we should be doing that as little aspossible. He claimed that there were so many reasons he couldn't list themall. Can you?
Yes. Yes I can. It's something I feel fairly strongly about. So strongly,that I'm often that "someone from outside the organization". Don't get me wrong, Microsoft Word has it's place. But 9 times out of 10that place is not as an attachment to email.
Let me first be clear: I know that a lot of folks use Word as their emaileditor in Microsoft Outlook. It's a simple setting, and while I also believeit's the wrong thing to do for many of the same reasons listed below, that'sactually not what I'm talking about here. The scenario that causes the worstproblems looks like this: you write a message in Word, you save that message todisk, and you then attach that resulting Word ".doc" document to an email whichyou then send to someone. Word is a wonderful word-processing program. I use it myself, probablydaily. It's feature rich (perhaps too much so), incredibly powerful, andabsolutely the right tool for creating good looking printed documents. Unfortunately it's too easy to come to rely on Word for everything. Eventhings that it's not well suited for. Like email. Here's why Word attachments are bad:
Your recipient may not have Word, or a program that can read Word documents.I often read email on my cell phone, and Word documents are promptly ignored.With handheld devices such as Treo's or Blackberry's becoming more and moreconnected, this is an increasingly frequent occurrence.
Your recipient may not be able to open the attachment. Due to theproliferation of viruses in Word documents, many mail programs don't allow Worddocuments to be opened directly, or in some cases, even saved to disk. Yes,there are ways around it, but many recipients don't know how, or areuninterested in taking the time to figure out how. Besides, why put up anadditional barrier when you don't need to?
Your recipient may never get the message. Email with attachments,particularly Word documents, are more likely to be filtered as spam or as apotential virus, even if they are neither. Avoiding attachments helps stacksome of the odds in your favor.
The message will be significantly larger than it needs to be. Word documentsare big. Often much bigger than the message they contain. The previousparagraph, a little over 40 words or around 250 characters resulted in a Worddocument over 20,000 bytes in size. Why do we care about size? Ever had yourhard disk run out of room? By sending around oversized documents you're forcingthat on your recipients as well. And, larger emails take longer to deliver,slow down networks and generally waste communications resources on theinternet.
The message will be significantly slower to open. You don't know what kindof machine your recipient has. Word is a big program. Requiring thatyour recipient open and run this large application in order to view yourmessage is just another barrier to getting your message read.
You run the risk of unintentional leaks of information. When "Fast Save" isenabled in Word, deleted information is not necessarily deleted from thedocument, it's merely marked as "don't show this". Using very simple tools thatpreviously deleted information possibly including old comments, notes and priorrevisions, is easily accessible to anyone.
Word's formatting abilities, while also making the document even bigger, areoften used in ways that detract from the message. Keep your message simple, andyou'll stand a much better of getting your message across.
So what's the right thing to do? 9 times out of 10 the right thing to do is to simply put your message intothe email body directly. Don't involve Word at all. Don't get fancy, don't gonuts with formatting or tables or pictures ... just say what needs saying andbe done. A smaller , faster message is much more likely to be delivered and read thana bloated, slow attachment in Word. It's that simple. And I'm not even talkingabout making your message smaller, say using fewer words (though that's goodtoo). I'm simply talking about the tools used to contain your message. When is Word called for?
In my opinion, Word is only called for when you are actually working on adocument. When you are, perhaps, collaborating on a document, or passing adocument around to be read or reviewed. If you've written a report that will atsome point be printed or published in some form, a Word document might beappropriate. If your message requires a very formal presentation (mostdo not), or it requires features or functionality found in Word (mostdo not), then Word might be called for. But if your message is only going to live or be viewed primarily in email -then there's simply no reason to drag an application such as Word into themixture. In fact, there's every reason to avoid it. I will throw out one last caveat: in some organizations, culture may dictatewhat you need to do. If that culture is "send everything in Word", I naturallyencourage you to work to change that culture if you can. Some organizationsgive you no choice. Certain types of communication require certain forms. Inthese cases, you're pretty much out of luck. The good news is that while everything I've said still applies, problems areslightly less when the email stays within an organization. Howeveronce you send outside of your organization and across the internet, then theseissues are of particular importance. Why?
A general principle of sending email (or any communication) is "The more recipients there are, the more time and care you should take in preparing it." It is ineffective and rude to waste the time of many people, asking them to decipher unclear language or bad attachment formats. There are many reasons to avoid sending or reading many kinds of attachments sent via email. Lets start with the disadvantages of one particular type of attachment: a Microsoft Word document. It is usually preferable to send plain text in the body of the message or HTML rather than a Word file. See below for how to do that.
The sender may be unwittingly revealing confidential information. Many versions of Word have a habit of revealing details about your computer and saving deleted text in a way that the<!-- old ref: href="http://www.microsystems.com/Shares_Well.htm" --> recipient can uncover (e.g. law firms have ended up revealing damaging information).<!-- was http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Colu...l?st.ne.per.gif.a and http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/new...6,2221330,00.html -->
Word files can transmit viruses, so they should only be opened if you are expecting the message.
Many people do not have any software they can use to read Word files, and it is often more of a hassle to read a Word file for those that do have such software. Many people avoid the use of Word and other Microsoft products because Microsoft has been convicted of illegal anti-competitive behavior and has a bad record on security.
Word files are slow to send and waste space. A typical one page document can be ten times bigger and slower in Word than in web format (HTML) or plain text. Many people have a limited amount of space in their mailboxes.
There are some "free" programs which allow people using some operating systems under many circumstances with many modern computers to read many Word documents. But some other people cannot use these programs even if they wanted to, and it is the clear goal and practice of Microsoft to continue to modify Word and its other programs so that all attempt to be compatible with them will fail. Remember - Microsoft has been convicted in court of just this sort of monopolistic behavior, and it was sustained upon appeal. If you prefer typing your documents in using Word, you can "Save as.... HTML" or "Save as... Text" and email the resulting file, rather than sending the original Word file (i.e. one with a ".doc" file name extension). Here are some more detailed instructions: open the document, click on File, then "Save As", and in the "Save As Type" strip box at the bottom of the box, choose "HTML Document" or "Web Page". Then choose Save. You can then attach the new HTML document instead of your Word document. Note that versions of Word change in inconsistent ways -- if you see slightly different menu item names, please try them. To convert to plain text is almost the same -- instead of HTML Document, choose "Text Only" or "Text Document" as the "Save As Type". Another alternative is to use "copy-and-paste". First "Edit/Select All" in Word and then paste it into your email program. Often it is better to put a file on a web site and then send a pointer to it (a URL) rather than attaching it to an email message. The email is smaller and faster, and when the recipient gets it and clicks on it they will always see the latest version. Many other types of attachments also cause problems, including Powerpoint, WordPerfect, etc. The standardized, open, native web format "HTML" is almost always a better choice if plain unformatted text really won't do. But HTML can carry privacy-invading things like webbugs and Javascript. It also increases the chance that your recipient won't see the mail because of spam filters. When sending spreadsheets just to be viewed, it is best to save them as PDF or HTML files rather than, e.g. Excel), unless you know all the recipients prefer getting them in a native format. If you expect them to edit the files and send them back, you need to find out what software they have available and what they prefer. Sending pictures is generally best done as standard .jpg or .png or .gif image email attachments, or as PDF files if they need to be printed (until standards like SVG are widely implemented). Sending wmf (windows metafile) images causes problems for recipients who don't have the proprietary software necessary to handle them.
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