Using Save As

There are two opinions about exchanging computer files. One is that there is no particular trick to it; if the file looks OK on one computer, it will look all right on another. The other opinion is correct: file exchange is impossible without foresight and, even then, a little luck.

I have been thinking about this because of a number of Microsoft Word documents that have been e-mailed to me recently. I do not own a copy of Word and I have nothing that can read its documents. But the problem can be avoided with that foresight that I mentioned, because Word can save files in a format that I can read.

Whether you own a PC or a Macintosh, the procedure is the same. When you are about to save your document, select "Save As..." from the File menu instead. When the "Save As..." dialogue box appears, look at the bottom for the words "Word Document (*.doc)". Beside it is a button with a downward-pointing triangle. Clicking on it brings a pop-up menu of file formats in which your document can be saved.

The screen shot below is the "Save As..." dialogue box from Microsoft Word on a Windows computer. Very similar dialogues exist on the Mac version and in other applications, including WordPerfect and AppleWorks. Just look for the pop-up list of formats.

Choices are wonderful, but confusing. My advice for the format to choose is:

* For plain text documents, that is, ones with no pictures and no text styles, choose "Text Only (*.txt)". This is as close as possible to a universal format.

* For documents with no pictures, but with some text formatting that you don't want to lose (boldface, centering, and so on), select "Web Page (*.htm, *.html)". This is almost as universal as plain text, these days. Even if a person's word processor can't display it properly, their web browser will.

* For documents with a lot of tricky formatting, try "Rich Text Format (*.rtf)." Microsoft developed this format specifically for exchanging documents with their formatting between programs, and most modern word processors support it.

Although I have only discussed word processing documents, the same principle works for databases, spreadsheets, graphics, sounds, and other types of information: discover what formats travel between different programs and use them.

With foresight and luck, you can share information with people who use different programs on different computers. There's almost always a way.

As I have remarked about word processing files, spreadsheet files can be easily shared between people who use different programs and even different computers. The one requirement is that the sender and receiver agree to use a format that the one can create and the other can import. The same is true of spreadsheet files. Here are some suggestions for sending Excel files to people who use a different spreadsheet, or even a database program.

Do not use the "Save..." command in the File menu, as you usually do. Your friend is "Save As..." right below it. The "Save As..." dialog box includes a reasonably large pop-up menu of file formats. In the Office:Mac 2001 version of Excel, it looks like this:

You are in luck if you see your colleague's program in that list. You can select the correct format, type in a name for the file you are saving, click the "Save" button, and be done. The only programs that are supported by name, however, are Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, and earlier versions of Excel.

There is obviously a problem if you either do not know what program your colleague uses or it is not on the menu. You need to decide, at this point, what you really want to send: just the data, or both the data and the formulae. You also need to decide how cautious you must be in the format you choose.

If you are sure that your colleague is using an up-to-date spreadsheet, you can safely save in SYLK format. This retains both the data and the formulae, so the whole spreadsheet is sent.

If your colleague may be using an older program, then "DIF (Data Interchange Format)," "Text (Tab delimited)," or "CSV (Comma delimited)" may be the best choice. These formats do not contain formulae, but they do contain the text and number data, including the results of the formulae.

"DIF (Data Interchange Format)" was invented by the creators of the very first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, to move text and numeric data between programs. I am partial to this format for that reason: it has been with us from the beginning. This would be my own choice to move data between programs.

"Text (Tab delimited)" represents the rows of your spreadsheet as individual lines of text with a tab character between each column. Numbers are saved in their full precision, and text is enclosed in quotation marks. You could load this in a word processor, if you needed to, but every database and spreadsheet I have heard of can import this format.

"CSV (Comma delimited)" is the same as tab-delimited text except that the tab characters are replaced by commas. This is, again, a very common format.

You should notice that there are two "CSV" selections: choose "CSV (Windows)" if the file will be used under that operating system or "CSV (Comma Delimited)" for use on a Mac. The difference between the two is how the end of a line is marked in a text file.

Macs use a carriage return character, Windows uses a carriage return and a line feed. Unix (including Linux) programs use just a line feed character, but there is no explicit support for that. High-end programs tend to be intelligent about using any of these conventions, so just try one of the formats and see if it works.

What if you are moving data from another program into Excel? The version of Excel in Office:Mac 2001 will import Lotus 1-2-3, FileMaker, AppleWorks 5 (not 6), and text files, whether they are SYLK (which transfers both data and formulae), tab-delimited, or DIF. The "Open File..." dialog box below shows the formats that Excel will import.

There is one final warning about transferring files from a Mac to Windows: make sure that you append the three-character "extension" to the file name that Windows uses to determine the format of the file. You can do this automatically by clicking the "Append file extension" checkbox in the "Save As..." dialog box.

Personal Computers have needed to share information since they were first created. It is not surprising that programmers have created a number of formats for moving data from platform to platform and from program to program. Using these formats eliminates a common source of bad feelings, wasted time, and vicious headaches.