Why geeks love text and so could you

You’d think developers would have nailed document format conversion by now. They haven't.

There are still incompatibilities between different generations of the same program. For example, Microsoft Word 2007’s docx file format isn’t automatically readable in older Word versions. The same goes for Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 files.

When you know in advance your colleague uses an earlier application version, you can do the polite thing and save your document in the older format. This “backward compatibility” is built-in to Word 2007. In fact most programs offer similar backward compatibility.

This is fine in theory, but you’ll either have to remember which format each colleague uses or you’ll just have to send everything in the older format.

Another failing of this approach is newer document formats may include important things missed by translation to older formats.

If someone sends you a docx file – and you’re running an older Word version, you’ll need to download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack from www.microsoft.com to work with the file. This also applies to Excel and PowerPoint files.

Converting files between programs from rival software companies or between different operating systems is harder. Not all software companies make conversion simple. Dealing with ancient documents from long-deceased operating systems is almost impossible. For example, I’ve got MS-Dos Wordperfect and Planperfect files I can no longer read.

Some geeks by-pass conversion problems by sticking with lowest-common-denominator file formats. Just about every application on any kind of operating system or hardware device, from supercomputers to mobile phones and mp3 players, can cope with plain text (.txt) files.

In fact, plain text is enjoying something of a revival thanks to texting and similar lo-fi applications.

Text makes sense if you don’t need to keep style formatting information such as fonts, character sizes and bold or italic characters in your documents.

An alternative low-end file format allowing some basic style formatting is .rtf, the rich text format. Microsoft developed this some 20 years ago to allow documents to move between different operating systems and it is still present as an option in many applications.

While I can no longer read my ancient Wordperfect files, I have recently found prehistoric documents from the early 1980s when I ran the CP/M operating system and a program called WordStar. Because WordStar stores files as text, they are still readable.