At 17:19 21.3.2001 -0500, you wrote: >For all who may be interested, please open the attached flyer, which >includes ordering information and a couple of excerpts.
Please let me quote a message posted to the list Nov. 15, 2000: Dear all, may I draw your attention to a never ending story. The title is: "Two good reasons #not# to send documents in a proprietary file format." Most users arent' aware of the risks they take, nor how easy the remedy is. Let me contribute to a little more awareness and knowledge. 1. *.DOC files may contain viruses. So chances are that you unintentionally (well, let's hope that :-) help them spread. What do you think the receiver will feel about you sender when he finds out how he got the virus? It may even become a lawyer's case easily. I myself never open a DOC file from unknown origin. You may call it paranoia, I call it cautious. And it does pay off. In more than fifteen years work with PCs, most of the time being responsible for many at the same time, I never encountered a successful virus or troian horse attack. Attempts there were. On the other hand I have seen several other people's PCs having virus infections which I cleaned then. 2. Does everyone own and use the latest version of word from Billieboy? The answer is no. Again there are good reasons not to keep on hopping onto each the newest version with many new errors. And there are other products from other vendors out there which can easily compete, let alone other platforms such as apple, linux, you name them. Since several years I cannot read the latest DOC format, and the same may hold true for many other people as well. So if you want to make your document accessible for your colleagues outside the micro$oft mono culture, you'd best send it in a platform and product independent format. Now, what is the solution? Very simple. If you are aware, it is only few mouse clicks away. "File", "store as..." opens a dialogue window. In the lower left part this window offers a drop down list for "document type" (or the like; I don't know the exact wording of the newest english dialogues). From that you choose "Rich Text Format (RTF)", then "ok". That procedure yields a file 'documentname.RTF' (the file 'documentname.DOC' still exists). The RTF # can transport all of your layout and text formatting, is # platform independent so everyone can read it, and # transport of virusses definitely is impossible. What more do you want? Well, this approach exhibits one little drawback. If your document contains graphics (drawings, pictures) it may become a rather large RTF file. The cure for that is to compress (ZIP, RAR, ...) it before sending. Use one of the many shareware or even freeware compressors available or a file manager with built-in conpressing capability (WinCommand, Norton Commander, ...) Ok, these were my two cents for a better world. hth. cu, Christoph Schmees Consultant and Trainer * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html =========================================================== osl...@egroups.com To subscribe, 1. Visit: http://www.egroups.com/group/oslist 2. Sign up -- provide an email address, and choose a login ID and password 3. Click on "Subscribe" and follow the instructions To unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@egroups.com: 1. Visit: http://www.egroups.com/group/oslist 2. Sign in and Proceed