ebizearnings.com - a SMB’s SEO/SEM web.point

So far as I can remember, it was around 1998 when I last time wrote and edited text in a .doc file using MS Office for an application. I mean an original file, created by myself. Because it happens all the time to have a client —and even a partner or colleague— hit at me with one of her .doc files. Arghhh!

Yes, yes, I know that they’re teaching this .doc writing in school — starting in grade school then spreading like a pest to high schools everywhere. And, oh my, most often invading colleges as well. My daughters became experts in .doc and .pps file creation thru grade school. Well, they had a bit of learning curve accommodating their homeworks inside the OpenOffice interface under OpenSuse Linux at home. They told me: “Pa, it’s a bit different but it looks more classy at home”. Couldn’t deny their innocent taste for class, but also taught them that doing text and graphs in Office and PowerPoint is far from being “cool”. That mobilized them to focus on learning The GIMP and Photoshop, Firefox and HTML coding in Kate — a simple text editor, non-WYSIWYG type.

Now what’s the point here with aiming to help you optimize your online small business experience? For one, it is about saving your time, your bandwidth, your hard drive space, and ultimately your healthy reasoning. Let’s proceed with an experiment:

1. I’m considering the file “Product Line Page.doc”; size 21.5KB; an MS Word document.

2. I open it with my OpenOffice word processor (what else?).

3. I hold Ctrl key and press the ‘A’ key (that’s a keyboard shortcut to perform a “Select All” command); then I hold Ctrl and press the ‘C’ key (keyboard shortcut for “Copy selected” command); with all the text copied to the clipboard, I give an Alt+F4 (hold Alt and hit F4) to close down the memory invasive office application.

4. Coming to the Kate editor (which always opens up at boot, because I always leave it opened when turning off the laptop, and Suse Linux remembers these habits). Once in Kate, I give a Ctrl+N keys hit to open a New document. Yes, you may use the menu if you want. After holding/hitting the Ctrl+N, a new document shows up instantly with its white clean page on top of some other permanently opened documents in the Kate editor. At this point I do a Ctrl+V (which happens to be the keyboard shortcut for “Paste in here what you’ve got on the clipboard”). Nice, all the paragraphs aligned text spreads in the new Kate document.

5. Let’s save this or we risk loosing all the data if Kim Jong Il explodes some electro-magnetic wave bomb. Don’t laugh! — if you work for years on a Linux laptop (or desktop) you come to think that lightnings or madmen could be the only hazard factors — the computer will never crash, nor freeze.

Where were we? Saving. We opt for this file name: “productlinepage.txt”. Notice that I avoid leaving blank spaces in a file name although this would be allowed on every operating system, be it Linux or Windows or Mac OS X. Notice also that I use small case exclusively and the extension I picked up is .txt – aka. a text file. Why no blank spaces in the file name? Because you’ll never know where your file is about to go, sit, move. It’s not a secret file — if so then feel free to assign it the craziest names and never forget to encrypt it beyond recognition. OK, so we assume your file is meant to be delivered to others —users or programmers— and that they will do something with the file, in order to process the information you’ve wrote in it. You will remember when some others were sending you odd looking (and acting) files, that annoyed you to some extend. Well, think that what you don’t like others doing to you is exactly what others won’t like you doing to them. That is why the names you’re giving to your files should be the simplest.

OK – our new text file is saved. Let’s go in the KDE/Konqueror Explorer to see how ‘fat’ is our .txt file. Hmm: 1.7KB… And it contains the EXACT text information that I copied out of the initial .doc file occupying 21.5KB. Precisely the same info, eh? Yes, and it takes 12 times fewer hard disk (and bandwidth) space in .txt than in .doc. Hard disk could be not as great an issue as bandwidth space. And don’t get fooled by the insignificant 21.5KB — that’s one single page in the .doc file. Keep in mind the 12x ratio factor.

Conclusion: When you’re not up to printing documents on paper (there are clever ways to do this without using .docs but about this another time) then you’d better think twice before firing up your MS Word to simply write texts to your employees, business partners, customers, friends. Instead of Word, just write directly into your email client application, or in some really simple and user friendly text editor application like NoteTab, Notepad, TextEdit, SimpleText, Vim, Emacs, Kate, xedit and the list goes on with free or commercial text editors, click here to get an entire wikipedia page wherefrom you can have your pick.

Think of sparing everyone —yourself included— 12x of trouble.

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