Valhalla Island

Your aim should always be the most raw format feasible. Of course binary is the most platform independent, interoperable format possible but it’s far from practical. In the majority of cases plain text should be your goal.

I have this problem everywhere, work, school, even transferring information between friends. Before you open Word to create a list of 5 items and a heading ask yourself if it’s really going to require a $200 software package with a pile of formatting controls so high you’re not aware of their existence.

Better yet, ask yourself if it needs formatting at all. If the answer is no, use a text file. A line of text for a heading, followed by a line break, followed by individual lines prefixed with dashes — when creating a list. It’s simple, it’s clear, it can be created, read and modified using free software on any platform, it can be transferred between places quickly, it can be extracted or embedded in other formats or documents easily.

The advantages of plain text are endless.

Even if you do need formatting, Markdown is the answer. I’ve been a much happier blogger since switching from WordPress’s simple WYSIWYG editor to Markdown. It handles simple formatting such as bold, italic, lists, blockquotes, headings, links and more. It’s still plain text so it inherits all the advantages of plain text. Some smart editors (TextMate) will even use syntax highlighting rules to make your Markdown formatted documents even more readable.

Markdown is open source so it’s been ported to a number of platforms and languages. You will always be able to use Markdown formatted documents.

If you require more complex formatting, the use of embedded graphics and the like, always distribute in PDF. That also goes for slideshows, even if it’s been created in Powerpoint, even if it export it to PDF before sending out. It’s called Portable Document Format for a reason and while it’s a proprietary format, Adobe does a great job at creating readers for all sorts of platforms.

PDFs will look the same no matter where they’re being viewed. They’re quick to open, browse and can usually be viewed right within a web browser. Most PDF viewing tools also have the ability to extract embedded images into their own images files. For anyone that’s tried individually extracting files from a Word document, it’s heaven.

Powerpoint, Excel and Word are expensive, platform specific, inflexible, inconvenient and just plain overkill.