How to improve your resume's looks

Photo courtesy Flickr user buyalex

(MoneyWatch) Sometimes it can seem pointless to carefully format and organize your resume. The best way to share a resume so it looks the way you intended is to provide it in PDF format, but often that's not possible. When you finally submit your resume to a potential employer, you sometimes have to copy and paste it into a text-only Web form or upload it as a Microsoft Word file because the company won't accept PDFs. There's not much you can do about those horrific text-only Web forms, but if you're sharing a Word doc, it's easy to make sure it looks its best.

The problem is that when you share a Word doc, the recipient sees it with all those red and green squiggles indicating potential grammar and spelling problems. It doesn't matter if it's Word just freaking out about acronyms and company names it has never heard of -- they still look abysmal and make your resume look less polished.

It turns out that it's really easy to disable those squiggles on other people's computers so your resume looks the way you intended.

As reported by technology blog Lifehacker, all you have to do is save your Word document in read-only format. When you share a read-only Word doc, Word suppresses all of the formatting recommendations so all you see is the text as you intended it.

If you have a new version of Word, you can do this by choosing File, Info, Protect Document, Restrict Editing. Then choose Read Only in the Editing Restrictions section of the pane on the right.

If you have an older version of Word, go to Tools, Protect Document, Read Only.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user buyalex

[MON4100]

Thanks! Really useful information. That's solved a problems for me.

[[e-mail]]

.. More like he's just trying to appeal to a broad, mainstream audience by employing the most widely-used, by far, word processor going. If you're going to be part of the crowd that seeks to reflexively denigrate all things Microsoft, this is the tradeoff you have chosen.

[TwoNav]

Support of OpenOffice and any other wordprocessing programs would be great, just so your write ups don't look like ithey are an advertisement for Microsoft.

[AlBlack52]

There are other wordprocessing programs than Word? It is decades since I have been sent a document in anything other than Word format. Even if it was generated in Open Office, then it was saved in the universal *.doc format. Either way, Dave's tip is right on the money.

[stephenbooth_uk]

Unfortunately in the corporate world Word still dominates. As with most software the people who choose it are usually not the ones who use it most or have to deal with the problems of corrupted documents. Also, because Word is currently the de facto standard in most large companies, that tends to be the one vertical applications integrate with. For example I was updating some insurance at the weekend in my bank, the application that generated the quote and policy documents used Word to lay them out and typeset them then save as PDF. Sure they could have used OpenOffice.org but that would have reduced the number of potential customers they had because most customers already have Word and don't have OpenOffice.org.

It may change. About 17-18 years ago WordPerfect was the dominant wordprocessor in business. At the time Word, Excel &c were mostly sold as individual products, Office did exist but integration was poor and it was really just like buying a box that happened to have all the componant products in. Around 1995 two things happend. The company that produced Wordperfect (I think it was either Corel or Novell but I'm not sure which or if it was another company) messed it up. They added new features and made changes to the interface which no doubt seemed perfectly sensible and desirable at design time but in production they ruined it. They gave their cash cow foot and mouth disease. At the same time Microsoft brought out Microsoft Office 95 which had much better integration (mostly by essentially replacing Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) with the much more functional Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), which incidentally made it much easier for 3rd party vertical applications suppliers to interface to the products). Additionally they also offered massive discounts on competitive upgrades so Wordperfect users could upgrade to Office 95 (which included not just Word but also Excel, PowerPoint (in the Pro version)and Access) for less than it would cost to upgrade just their wordprocessor. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft were actually using Office 95 as a loss leader to get people on board as some of the discounts were more than the book price of the product being upgraded from. The company I worked for at the time bought a load of end of line copies of Harvard Graphics, never even opening the box, to use to 'upgrade' the users who didn't have WordPerfect to Office 95 as the upgrade discount was about £100 more than the cost of Harvard Graphics so we could 'upgrade' everyone to Office 95 for less than upgrading only the essential users, who already had WordPerfect, to the next version of Wordperfect.