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Subject:Saving Word to ASCII? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 13 Mar 2001 15:10:41 -0500
Tony Dutson reports: <<I want to apply to a certain company online. Their
resume submit page wants me to submit an ASCII text version. The actual text
field request is: "Please copy and paste an ASCII text version of your
resume here." I haven't done this before and Word doesn't have an option to
save in ASCII.>>
Another case of using terms that don't match either the software or what the
typical user would think to use. In fact, ASCII means nothing more than
"unformatted text", which Word describes in the "save as" dialog box as
"text only", "text only with line breaks", and a few other miscellaneous
variations on that wording. Try 'em all for future reference and see which
one works best.
The simplest solution is probably to just select the text, copy it, and
paste it into a text editor such as WordPad (which comes with Windows) or
SimpleText (for the Mac) and use carriage returns, lines (- - - -) and white
space to format it nicely without actually applying styles such as
boldfacing. Make sure the lines aren't too long (typically no more than
about 60 characters) so that your nice, vanilla layout doesn't get
word-wrapped when they open it at the other end. You could possibly just cut
and paste from Word directly into the text field, but you're likely to have
all kinds of problems with word wrap and formatting.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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