MSWord .doc Files Are Bad

Here's why:

• They transmit nasty viruses. If you have a virus and you send me a .doc file, and I open it, I may well get your virus. And I have a virus and I send you a .doc file, and you open it, you may well get my virus. And neither of us would necessarily even know there's viruses being transmitted!

  When you open a document that has a virus in it, it doesn't pop up a window that says "YOU ARE NOW INFECTED!". Instead the document looks fine, nothing noticeable happens -- but mysteriously in a few hours, days, or weeks, the virus starts eating your bandwidth, memory, hard-drive space, or data.

• .doc files are much much larger than they need to be. 14K worth of text turns into a 200K .doc file, compared to at most 40K of RTF.

• MSWord files can inadvertently convey information from your system besides just the document being sent -- sometimes important secret information of yours!

• It puts pressure on people to use Microsoft products, and discriminates against people who don't, because the .doc format is actually really hard to parse.

If you want to preserve formatting more than you can in plaintext, send RTF or HTML.

In MSWord, you can save any document as RTF by selecting "File" / "Save as..." and choosing "Rich Text Format" From the "Save as type" menu, like so:

One feature that I've been using for some time without any trouble (and with a great savings in disk-space used by documents) is having MSWord default to saving as RTF.

You do this by selecting "Tools" then "Options", then select the "Save" tab, and change the "Save Word files as" menu to say "Rich Text Format":