Why is attaching a Word document to email such a bad idea?

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I have a relative who received a .doc attachement, a shedule for his daughter from school. He had just gotten a Vista system and couldn't open it at first, you have to save it on your hard drive first.

Then when he did open it it was just a jumbled mess. I assumed it was in a format not compatible with his basic word program. I found the link to the Microsoft Word Viewer, he had to download a 25MB file on a dial-up connection.

He downloaded it and was able to read the attachement.

[link removed]

I have a problem with folks who e-mail bids or quotes using Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. How easy would it be for me or someone else to make a significant change in their price, print it out, then attempt to hold them to it? Print anything you don't want modified as a PDF, and/or lock down the file if possible to prevent just such a scenario.

not only is adding word .doc attachments a generally bad idea, also any other "attachment" that could be simply put in the body of the email text is a bad idea,
a word .doc can be anywhere from 3 - 10 times the size of the actual text it contains, some people still have inbox & storage limits especially those imposed by corporate IT Dept. if you're close to that limit and an email with a huge .doc attachment comes in it might not be delivered or some of your previous emails might be purged before you want them purged,

my general rule is only send attachments at the request of the recipient.

If the document is saved as .rtf, it will open in Wordpad and should not carry macros with it.

Kerry

Slightly off-topic but speaking of Word, I've used your approach to slimming down my system, which I by and large love, but this article does remind me to raise one question I have: one of the methods you recommend to slim down your system is to delete all documents with the .doc extension -- these are Word documents. If I deleted all of my Word docs, my entire life would be destroyed, as a writer, a teacher, and sometimes a student. Is there ever a situation where one would want to delete all Word docs to slim down a system?

This is very helpful. I love WordPerfect and have struggled working back and forth. I was glad to see that .rtf is such a good accomodation. One of my computers has both Word and WordPerfect, the other, shareware (ThinkWrite, et. al.). Many times I use Notepad, less often, WordPad.

I edit many resumes and may need to purchase the PDF conversion software.

I will continue checking your site for more ideas, advice and info exchange. Thank you.

Any convincing arguments against using .rtf format? I noticed other people suggested it and it is used in usenet and bbs for documents as well.

Hi Leo,
When I send an email with an attachment, I check my sent mail & open up that attachment. I discovered I have access to all MY DOCUMENTS, Desktop etc from downloading the attachment. Does the addressee have the same access? In addition, I forwarded the email to my address & I was still able to access MY DOCUMENTS & other computer info from Word Documents to Desk Top views from my InBox. Again, my concern is that the addressees can click on any of my documents or open files from my computer. Do they(addressees) have the same access to my computer? Finally, I also sent it to another address my daughter uses on my computer & we still had access. This is scaring me.

If I attach a document from Word into an email, will the receiver be able to view any other documents I have in Word?

Only the ones you email him.

23-Aug-2009

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