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Going paperless
Posted on September 18th, 2009 No commentsI received an email recently from a Bank Manager regarding a visit I made to him. His email signature included the following:
I kinda laughed because his email was informing me he had faxed a form that needed to be filled out and faxed back. Not particularly environmentally friendly.
Ideally, forms should be in PDF that can be filled in electronically! They can be emailed back and forth and only the final filled-out version should be printed (if at all).
Even if they aren’t interactive, forms should be in PDF (please, no more Word .doc files) so they can be printed at home and filled out, scanned (not faxed) and emailed back.
Fax quality is inferior to scanning and emaling anyway.
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Are you still mailing Microsoft Office files around?
Posted on September 18th, 2009 2 commentsThen stop it! That is, unless you need the recipient to edit and send it back (but that’s another post, you should be using Google Docs).
Word or Excel files are not universally compatible. A person may have an older version of Word, Excel or Office and they won’t be able to view a file or view it the way you intended. And if you send it to a Mac person they are even more likely to have problems with it.
It is pretty easy to create PDF files of ANYTHING and to email those files instead. PDF is a univeral format that displays the original data just as it was originally created.
Mac’s have PDF support built in. For PCs EVERYONE should install a program such as CutePDF which is a printer driver. That means anytime you are looking at something you want to send to someone, be that a word doc, a spreadsheet, a webpage, an email message, a map, etc. , just select to print it using the installed CutePDF driver and out will popout a nice PDF file for you to email.
CutePDF is free, so what are you waiting for?