I recently had an interesting question. A site I work with has traditionally posted Word documents and/or PDFs. The question asked: is one type preferred for the web and why?
You can post things as Word documents, but posting as a PDF is a better practice.
Why not Word?
Word documents have three strikes against them.
- They do not open consistently from computer to computer.
- They can more easily manipulated by the recipient, which may not be desirable.
- You’re required to have Word, or a an advanced enough program that can convert Word documents.
Sure, number 3 is getting to be less of an issue. You can open a Word doc in Google Docs, after all. And there’s always Open Office. But it’s still a hassle.
I’ve had a big issue with #1 & #2 a lot, as well. You spend hours designing the perfect form to fit onto one sheet of paper. But the user’s copy orphans two lines on a second page. Yeck. Or the user modifies text in there that you didn’t want them to mess with. Double Yeck. Especially when they expect you to notice their sneaky little modifications.
Why PDF?
PDF, on the other hand is designed to be portable. Look at what PDF stands for: “Portable Document Format.” A PDF will consistently open exactly the same amongst various devices (the basic requirement is that you have a web browser).
Another plus note is that a PDF can be made with editable fields. This was one of the big reasons in the past to use Word — to have a form with only certain fields that could be filled in. This is still a workable solution, but aPDF makes it much more user-friendly, and yields more consistent results back to you when they’ve filled out the form.
1 response so far ↓
1 Finding Nemo // Oct 26, 2009 at 4:58 am
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