Peevish Question: Word Attachments

Tell them that Word documents can include macros, and the macro language is amply powerful enough to introduce malware to your system.

Actually, it's not a good idea to click on attachments in general, unless you a) are sure who sent it, and b) you trust i) them and ii) their computer security.

Plain text is your friend.

Why people send information (that they want as many people as possible to be informed of) in any sort of proprietary format, e.g. pdf, doc, etc., is beyond me. Even if there are viewers available why do you want people to jump through hoops just to see your information? I think it's laziness _and_ I think people want to preserve their pretty formatting.

And why-oh-why do they feel the need to attach 3MB pictures to their email, sent to a wide distribution list?

Resize & compress before hitting 'send', people! It's not that hard!

Yeah, try being a linux or mac user, who probably doesn't have MS office installed...

Richard Stallman (open-source zealot) doesn't even bother anymore - he just shoots a canned reply back to the sender:

You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so it is hard for me to read. If you send me plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I will read it.

Distributing documents in Word format is bad for you and for others. You can't be sure what they will look like if someone views them with a different version of Word; they may not work at all.

Receiving Word documents is bad for you because they can carry viruses (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_virus). Sending Word documents is bad for you, because a Word document normally includes hidden information about the author, enabling those in the know to pry into the author's activities (maybe yours). Text that you think you deleted may still be embarrassingly present. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3154479.stm for more info. . .

(The full thing is here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)

could be your going to ask the wrong question. Every organization should have some level of communication plan and standards.

So if you want to ask a better question which might get better reception for those that outrank you... ask if the communication standard and plans really help ensure the most effective communication with the target audiences. This then can lead to the discussion of Word, HTLM , text, email in general etc.

Make the focus more effective communication for the program and university not about you as a single user (unless you can show you represent their target base)

P.S. laziness and technical incompetence are only the negative connotations for the what you describe (why be only negative) maybe the folks (including interns) who are given these tasks for communication only know or have been trained in this way or since this is the way it has been done think they are doing a great job.

Chad,

I agree - this kills me. Also, when other departments put links to word documents as though they were html pages - ARGH.

Here is my favorite response (that I never use because I doubt it would actually work).
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/dont-send-word-documen…

Yup, this is definitely one of my pet peeves as well. What kills me is that some offices send highly formatted e-mails without attaching a single file (since you can format directly in many e-mail clients). This makes the Word attachments seem even less intelligent. I just despise Microsoft products in general, though.

I also agree with the annoyance of the huge 3 MB attachments and the problems for those of us using Macs or Linux. On a positive note, Microsoft's ineptitude and intransigence (i.e. Vista) finally convinced my wife, a life-long PC user, to switch to a Mac. With the rise of Ubuntu, Linux, and so many other OSes, could Windows' days be numbered?? (Please?)

The angle you're looking for is lawsuit exposure due to accessibility issues.

I've noticed that the people who send me Word docs get annoyed when I send them stuff in OpenOffice format. Funny, that.

I'm not so sure that HTML mail is much better -- the sender has no idea how it will be rendered by your mail client, so a font that looks OK on their desktop might be unreadable on yours. Plus some perfectly sensible adults compose their e-mails the way a teenager would create their MySpace page. (why do they think that animations look professional?)

Or is this just a case of laziness and technical incompetence?

Yes. As Atrios would say, this has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

If it's a simple memo, it should always, under all circumstances, be included in the body of the text. PDF is acceptable for longer documents which may contain essential formatting (such as papers or policy documents). About the only instance where sending a Word file makes sense is if it's a collaborative document to which you reasonably expect me to provide edits; otherwise my presumption is that the contents were not important enough to put in the message and therefore something I can choose not to read.

I still run Office 2004 on my office Mac, and I have no plans to upgrade. Neither AFAICT does my boss, who considers the new version to be a downgrade. That means I cannot read anything in Office 2007 .doc format or (heaven forbid) .docx format. I have a collaborator who is sufficiently computer-clueless as to (1) prefer Word for everything, even presentations and (2) occasionally forget that not everybody can read Word 2007 documents. But at least he is sending formatted content. The standard memos that you are complaining about (and I, too, am seeing too many of these) should be plain text, not Word files.

Also, echoing Radha's comment: You do not need to have a background picture/design/whatever in your e-mail. It doesn't add anything to your message other than wasted kilobytes. If you have to send a picture in a particular e-mail, attach it (but do consider resizing/compressing if it's more than a megabyte or so).

I had this same issue a couple of years ago, but it seems to be sorted out now. You have to be a little bit careful because the people who are sending these attachments probably don't know any better and you don't want to offend anyone. The problem was mainly with admin staff, because the scientists were a bit more aware of Linux/Mac usage. On the other hand, most admin people practically live in Microsoft Office, so the idea that anyone might be bothered about having to use it simply doesn't occur to them.

What I did was to send an email to the head of IT suggesting that we institute a policy of only allowing attachments in formats that everyone can read, such as rtf, and that any content that is essentially plaintext should be sent as such. I carefully explained that there were several Mac and Linux users who don't have viewers for Microsoft documents installed and don't particularly feel the desire to use them. Even html emails should be avoided because they didn't work with the Blackberrys available at that time (important considering where I worked), some people were using pine to read their email and, well, most people's html emails are just an ugly mass of random fonts and colors (much like the same people's Word documents). I also explained that Word was a bad format to use for archiving things like agendas, minutes and newsletters, since we don't know that the format will be commonplace in the future. This email had absolutely no effect, so I don't know why I just wrote a long paragraph explaining it to you.

The next stage was to show up at the IT/Researcher meeting to raise the issue in person. All I got from this was an acknowledgment of the issue, but no promise that anything would be done about it. Then, several months later, the Word attachments simply stopped. My guess is that several other researchers more important than myself must have complained about it.

Now the only issue I have is people sending out Excel spreadsheets for budgets that only have about five items on them. Still, there is not really a good open format for spreadsheet data that Microsoft addicts can create easily from Excel, so I feel a bit sheepish complaining about it.

Matt

Couldn't they send spreadsheets in RTF format?

As a web developer, I can tell you why it happens at least at my business (which is a university).
People are lazy, ie. people receive a document (either via another staff member who wrote it or from outside the university) and rather than copy and pasting just attach the document to email out.

The second reason is that rich text emails are hard to get right and to display properly in all email clients and browsers. It's much easier to get a website working properly in all the major browsers than it is to get an HTML email with images, formatted text working in all the email clients (especially with things like iPhones and Blackberrys on the rise).

Think of all the stores whose emails you have signed up to receive invariably the vast majority are just one big image that you have to allow to be displayed in your email client. Creating that sort of thing takes a lot of time and energy especially compared to the return.

I'll agree it's stupid and wrong, especially due to the rise of Macs in the computer market. I'll also say that IT departments have a lot of complaints from a lot of different people, there are I can almost guarantee you someone who thinks Word attachments are awesome and whoever wants to get rid of them is stupid.

This fucking shit pisses me off on two levels.

(1) When I get an e-mail that says, "Genetics Department Seminar Announcement! See attached flier!" Fuck me! Just write in the e-mail: "Genetics Department Seminar. Dr. Joe Blow, University of Ass, 'Electron Density Maps Of My Nutsack', Room 235, Douche Building" I really don't need to see the motherfucker's fucking head shot!

(2) If you need to send me a document, send the motherfucker either in plain text or as a PDF, not in some closed proprietary format that I need to buy some fucking shitass software to open. How fucking pissed would people be if I sent them documents in Adobe InDesign files (which I use to generate most of my pages)? Sending Word docs is just as presumptuous and rude!

Thank you, Chad, for giving me this opportunity to rant in solidarity with you. You are so fucking off the deep end with that GPS laser football spotting shit, though.

I've seen an interesting attempt at solving the ridiculous attachment problem seen in so many companies:

At least one place I worked set up their email server to look for attachments on emails, "de-attach" them, store them on a web server, and substitute an appropriate URL in the email to access the document.

This solved the problem with having dozens of copies of the same 3 MB attachment across the recipients' mailboxes. It also made it possible to convert some attachments--such as MSWord or Excel--to PDF documents, storing those at the provided URL instead of the source document.

It didn't keep people from doing stupid things, but limited to scope of the damage, at least.

Simple announcements do not require attachments.

I'll have to remember "downgrade". Why do they insist on reducing my productivity when we can't afford to buy the new product, not to mention the bigger and faster computers needed so it will run only a bit slower than the old software did on machines we already owned?

RE item 2 in #14: Someone at our college sent out a massive attachment written with some massive M$ malware that took several minutes just to load on my fairly fast PC and was, of course, totally useless to Mac users. When rendered into a pdf, it was few dozen kB rather than a few dozen MB.

RE #4: I've enjoyed the heck out of looking at the internals of documents that get sent around. The info on edit time and old versions can be enlightening. What boggles my mind is when the item being sent out could be altered significantly with a minor edit. If it is official, it should be in a form where it is a bit harder to change it before saving or printing it.

For get irritation. It seems to me that the risk of viruses etc is high enough to make attachments in general undesirable, and attachments in such a risky format unallowable. There should be a general rule against such attachments, at least if anyone is interested in preventing nasty infections.

Even secure (as in government secure! can you believe it?) computer systems get infected by crap like this. Just put that stupid attachment on a stupid CD and take it to your secure networked computer.

"Is there a polite way to tell people (many of whom outrank me) to knock this off because it irritates me to no end?"

You could ask them to resend the message in plain text, because your virus scanner deleted the attachment. Repeat until they learn.

Quick note: You tell your Excel senders who want to send small amounts of spreadsheet-ready data to use CSV (comma-separated values) format, which is plain text and readable by most spreadsheet programs or your favorite Perl or shell script.

As for Word documents, Microsoft may be helping to deal with this problem themselves, by having the latest version of MS Word (2007) save documents by default in a *new* format which is *incompatible* with any other programs or older versions of Word. You have to jump through an extra hoop to save documents in a compatible format, at which point why not save in an even more compatible format such as PDF, HTML, RTF, or plain text?

But the overall battle against proprietary, unsafe attachments is lost until the software makes it *just as easy* to send the attachments in a better format. For example, it shouldn't be too hard to have an email client asked to attach a Word document pop up a dialog box asking the sender whether to convert the document to PDF (probably the best choice to preserve formatting). Computers are supposed to enhance productivity, so complaining the computer users are too "lazy" to do something misses the point entirely -- anytime doing the right thing is significantly more time consuming than doing the wrong thing, there is an opportunity to improve the software.

Ah! One of the most difficult things in pseudo-reality is the mechanics of managers. The WORD file got generated for some other purpose, probably managerial review prior to transmission. That took so much time and effort that the person who actually sent the message found the effort of moving the information from WORD file to email too much. Hence the attachment.

I'm in complete agreement with the ridiculousness of the MS hegemony, and it really ticks me off when people send me Office 2007 files.

However, I feel obligated to point out that Microsoft does offer a conversion utility for Office 2003 that allows it to open, read, edit, etc Office 2007 files. The initial open takes a bit longer due to the conversion, but I've never had any trouble with preserving formatting etc. Of course, the utility isn't available for pre-2003 versions of Office.

As for how to deal with the attachments, I'm in agreement with Lassi (#18)--just tell them you can't read it. Better yet, ignore the email, and when they ask if you got it, tell them you couldn't open it. Eventually, they'll figure it out.

Of course, the utility isn't available for pre-2003 versions of Office.

Sure it is. In fact, I just installed it yesterday on Office 2000 so I could open a fucking docx file some shithead e-mailed me.

However, I feel obligated to point out that Microsoft does offer a conversion utility for Office 2003 that allows it to open, read, edit, etc Office 2007 files.

And I feel obligated to point out that I'm the person responsible for installing software on my computer, and I am normally not in the mood to go hunting for some plug-in to install merely so that I can read a Word 2007 file that should have been sent as either plain text or PDF. Or (and this remark is directed at a certain journal editor in my subfield--if you're reading this, you know who you are) to go hunting for some video plug-in to view movie files in a paper whose authors have insisted on putting them in a format so obscure that QuickTime Pro will not open it. The burden is on the person sending me such material to show that going through the trouble is worth it to me. Standard type memos do not meet this threshold.

That's why several of the commenters on this thread object to the practice: because the people who send such attachments have made an incorrect assumption about the capabilities of the software we choose to have on our computers. We feel that asking us to change our habits merely to read these attachments is an unreasonable request.

If I were going to send you an image file, there are several standard and platform-agnostic formats I could use: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, etc. I would not send you a Photoshop or Illustrator file unless you had made clear in advance that that was what you were expecting. Even then I would have some trepidation since our versions of Adobe products may not match. Word 2003/2007/whatever vs. plain text or PDF is the same argument.

(1) Keep a list of all the a**holes who spammed you with proprietary bloatware files.

(2) When we have a popular standard for interactive high-def color 3-D video haptics teledildonics (to use Ted Nelson's term), spam them right back, terabytes each.

(3) Profit!