Posting Plain Text on the Internet

This essay gives you tips on posting plain text on the Internet. Some companies or job sites do not allow you to attach your resume to your application. You are expected to enter your resume information directly into the fields provided on the form, or in the body of the email itself. If you cut and paste directly from a Word document, the results will not look pretty.

In this case, you will either have to do extensive re-editing of the resume at the time of cut and paste, or you can cut and paste from a plain text version. This article will give you tips on how to create a plain text version of an existing word document. You will have to have a decent working knowledge of word to do this.

1. Save a copy of your resume that you are willing to "destroy."
2. Select all the text (CTRL-A should do it).
3. Change the font to COURIER, 11 points. Don't worry about what this does to the document at the moment.
4. Apply Align Left for all paragraphs instead of Justify.
5. Set the right and left margins to 1.25 inches. (Used in conjuction with the above font, this will give you 65 characters per line).
6. Convert any tables to text with tab separators
7. Remove all tabs, bullets and special symbols. You can use "o," ">," or "+" to simulate bullets. Use spaces to simulate tabs.
8. Put a "hard return" at the end of each line. (Press <Enter>).
9. Edit the file to make it look like what you want to see.
10. Save the file as text only with line breaks.
11. Open the file in notepad (Start -> Run -> notepad).
12. Maximize notepad and view the file. Re-adjust any lines that wrap and clean up anything missed in the previous steps.
13. Save the file as your text-only version.

You should be able to cut and paste from this notepad version whenever you need plain text.