Playing Nicely with Others

You know the drill. You’re asked to email a document to someone; you have a Mac, they don’t… so what’s the best way to make sure that they will be able to open what you send them? What about formatting? How can you make sure that what they get looks the same as what you sent??

This happens a lot and it may be one of the world’s great time-wasters.

“Hi, Bill. Yeah, can you resend that report? I don’t have SuperTexter 5.12* and I can’t open it using ProPrint 3.1*”
*insert any number of applications here.

What about MS Office and Word? Well, sure - that’s an option; if you want to pay for it but personally, I will not intentionally give micro$oft any money if I can possibly avoid it. Office doesn’t come bundled with a Mac, although there is a trial version on most new machines.

So what are the options? How do Mac users play nice with others?

Let’s look at text first.

The obvious choice is to download a free office suite which is compatible to MS Office. There are a couple of these around but the one I settled on was Neo Office. It’s not super fast and I’m told that it is lacking some of the more advanced features of the commercial applications, but at least you can open and create MS Office documents without shelling out hundreds of dollars. Neo Office has coped with all the Word, Excel and PowerPoint files I have been sent so far.

We don’t have time to go into the whole “how did MS Office documents become the ‘standard’ anyway??” right now. The point is, I have been able to manage very well thanks to the hard work of those that created Neo Office and Open Office and chances are you will too - power users excepted!

But what if you’re on a dial up connection and don’t want to download over 100Mb…

Most word processing applications, including AppleWorks, have the option to save as Rich Text Format or RTF. This was how I worked between my PowerBook 150 and the PCs at teachers college in 1997. Writing in ClarisWorks and saving as RTF, I was able to work on my PowerBook saving the file on a PC formatted floppy disk. I could then take this to college, open it on the PC and print it out.

The rules for RTF are sometimes a little vague and some formatting may be lost in translation.

If the file is only to be read at the other end then making a PDF is a great option.

OS X has the ability to make a PDF from practically any application. It’s in the print dialog; instead of printing, choose to save (or “print”) the document as a PDF.

This is a really good option for a couple of reasons. First, you can be confident that the PDF that you send will look the same at the other end. This means that you can use your favorite application to make a document and at, the end of it, just make it into a PDF and send it off. At the other end, all that’s needed is a PDF reader - and Adobe Acrobat, the Grandfather of PDF readers, is free.

The downside of this method is that it’s read-only at the other end. If what you’re sending needs to be altered, this isn’t going to work so well. The recipient can copy and paste the text into another application if they need to. For the most part, things that I send to people are not going to be changed at the other end and so a read only PDF is perfect.

Finally, we should not forget TextEdit. This little gem actually opens Word documents and does a pretty good job of it. It’s a lean mean text editor that saves in Rich Text or plain text; if all else fails a plain text file will at least get the content to someone else. Everyone can open a plain text file!!

How about pictures? Can we all agree to just send the images as attachments rather than embed them into a one gigabyte PowerPoint slide show? Jpegs are great for lots of colors, gifs are great for a few colors and PNG’s are also widely used.

Remember to optimize your personal pictures too. It’s a hassle to download half a dozen full size, uncompressed pictures even if you have a fast connection. Remember folks, this is about good manners!!

You can make your pictures smaller by
1) making their physical size smaller e.g. going from 800x600 pixels down to 300x200 pixels dramatically reduces the file size and therefore the download time of the picture.
2) reducing the number of dots per inch down (dpi) to 72 or somewhere down there. If all you’re doing is sending photos to your friends or family to look at, this sort of resolution is fine. YouI’d go may need to keep it higher if you’re going to print the images.
3) compressing the image

Free programs like the Gimp and Graphic Converter have these options but iPhoto does a good job of doing all of this for you.

What about spreadsheets? Here Excel really does rule the roost. The main reason for that is that it’s actually a really good application. If someone sends you an Excel spreadsheet, Neo Office and the other variations will open it however things like macros may be lost. Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are simple and work fine.

If you’re trying to move between AppleWorks Spreadsheet and Excel (or any other spreadsheet applications) you can always try and export the file as a tab delimited or comma separated text. If you’re on the same Mac, sometimes a simple copy and paste will do the trick.

Finally, let’s not overlook email. Let’s not use Word attachments where the body (or even the subject line) of the email will suffice. You don’t need a Word document to say that a meeting has shifted from 4.00pm to 4.30pm!!

I’m sure that there are heaps of other tips and tricks of how to be a good citizen and how to play nicely with others. So do your bit and let us know what they are!