Not every email needs to be a PDF attachment

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My daughter goes to a great preschool. She’s happy, the teachers are great, she has lots of friends, it’s convenient.

But the director of the school is, to put it politely, a complete and total nitwit.

Mostly, I just deal with it. I have no real idea what her job is, other than to rhapsodize about how wonderful children are and sing the praises of Montessori, but it’s not a job I’d want and she’s basically got a good heart.

She’s a technophobe who refuses to understand how to use computers. Any comment about the computer flusters her and is met with handwaving about the incredibly complicated nature of using it.

And even that I can deal with – I’d prefer to get more, better communication by email rather than handouts in our daughter’s folder that we need to remember to pick up, but at least they’re communicating. Misspellings, cheesy clip-art, and all.

But it’s starting to drive me crazy that every single email she sends out is not actually an email message. Instead it’s a brief sentence: “Please see attachment.” And a PDF.

And the PDF is not usually anything complicated. Here’s the message that came in today’s PDF: “Due to our upcoming holiday, the 4th of July, we are requesting that tuition checks be due on Friday, June 27th, postdated for the 1st of July. We appreciate your help in this matter.”

That’s it. Two sentences. No graphics of any kind. No frilly font. No reason this couldn’t have been in email.

I can’t believe it’s actually easier to turn those into a PDF and attach it to your email than it was to write the email in the first place. Even if you had to write it in Word first, just copy and paste.

Yes, computers are scary. But it’s 2008. These aren’t some interesting and novel fad that’s about to pass away. They’re a primary form of communication.

And they’re a medium where it’s, frankly, kind of rude to send an attachment every time. Unless there’s a reason.

I’ve mentioned this. I’ve commented on it (twice!) in the anonymous surveys you requested that we fill out – the request itself, of course, attached as a two-sentence message in a PDF.

On it goes, with no acknowledgment that it’s ever been brought up.

Jesus fucking Christ on a fucking pony, lady, get with the 21st century! Take an email communication class! Stop making me fire up Preview (and thank god it doesn’t have to be Acrobat Reader) just to tell me you moved up our payment date this month!

Righty, then. All vented out.

2

While there’s no reason to disagree with pitting a wilful technophobe, I can guess what’s probably happening: Acrobat forces its own toolbar into Word, which in my experience reappears after you’ve turned it off, and includes a ‘convert to PDF and email’ option. She’s typing things into Word because that’s, well, where you type things, and there’s this handy button to email it to everyone…

3

see attachment for my response… :slight_smile:

I hear you and can relate.
My pet email peeve is my younger brother. Why on why do you forward crap…first off the jokes ain’t that funny, but they are even less funny when I have to open 8 emails to get to the fucking joke. Is it really that difficult to open the joke/pic/whatever and either just forward that one, or copy it into a new email?

If you weren’t my brother and I would just delete the damn things all together…but bro–I love you…just learn to use email okay? Please?

4

I hate people who send out an email to a huge list of people but they don’t put the addresses in the BCC box and instead put them in the To box. That way I get to scroll past 300 email addresses to get to the 1 sentence notice or whatever.

5

God almighty, I’ll join in your pitting! There is no reason to make n people, where n=the number of people on the distribution list who haven’t already made it a habit to ignore your emails, open every friggin’ attachment. Put enough information in the subject and/or body so people know if they want to read the details. And, of course, don’t use an attachment when a bit of text will do.

6

Cubsfan, she does that, too. I know the email address of most parents in my daughter’s class because of it. It’d bother me more if it weren’t a small class. As it is, it’s just more evidence of overall cluelessness.

GorillaMan, you’re more than likely exactly right. At least that explains why she’s settled on this bizarre method of sending email.

7

We have the opposite problem: People who DON’T put something into PDF which should be. In our state, different agencies may use entirely different applications, and there are a number of particular users who just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that not everyone else in the state doesn’t have Acme Whoosis installed. I have often had to reply to the sender that her “Critically Important Administration Bulletin” is totally unreadable for 98% of her recipients.

8

Quite right too. Everyone knows really important messages should be sent as PowerPoint files.

9

Mute sound… mute sound, goddammit! No! Not that same Proverbs verse again! FUCK!

10

Well, I know very little about computers relative to the rest of you, but my Human Resources department recently sent me some Leave of Absence forms in a .tif file, which I could not open with any program I have on my computer…even with my son’s help. I called and asked if she could resend the attachment as a .pdf, and she called me to say no, she’d have to either fax or mail them. Fortunately a friend in another state was able to convert them to a pdf for me, but what a bother! When it was a .tif, i could print the first page of the forms, but pages 2-5 were photos from my personal files, and the rest of the pages were stock photos that are apparently stored on some program somewhere in my computer… The worst part is, we’re not talking some rinky-dink company…we are a national chain with 700 stores…and they were unable to convert the file for me at corporate into a form I could use.

I offered to send it back to her as a pdf in case she needs it for someone else…lol.

11

For future reference, you can read TIF files with Irfanview, an excellent and free image viewer/editor. TIF isn’t as widespread as PDF but it’s still a fairly common format, esp. for scanned or faxed multi-page documents.

12

Thanks. That’s helpful to know. I’ll give the info to the girl in HR too, so she can help others in the same boat.

13

I have a similar gripe about folks who think Word is for everything and therefore send all screen shots and other graphic images as otherwise empty Word documents into which a copied graphic has been pasted.

14

You can open it with Windows Picture & Fax viewer, too… actually, AFAIK, XP automatically opens .tif files that way…

Obviously, that won’t work if you’re on a Mac.

15

Preview on a Mac opens TIFFs no prob.

16

Extra black marks for sending a cropped-in-word pic (it makes the filesize even bigger, whereas cropping it outside word before pasting makes it smaller). They lose some black marks if they’re able to at least set the “paper” to be sideways before pasting a bloody screenshot (of which perhaps 10% is relevant).

People who claim there is no reason to try to make files smaller before sending piss me off. My current project has come with 3 corporate emails (yes, these people need some organizational skills), but all have small inboxes and I can only archive in one of the three. Almost any emails sent with attachments will start the dread Empty Your Inbox emails from the admin demon.

Why is it that every project involves at least one coworker who sends all excel files with the autofilter on and several colors? I’m not going to ask for it as a tab-separated .txt, but if each recipient will be looking at different data, take the autofilter off; if they must all look at the same three lines, copy and paste them to a new document instead of sending the whole thing. With colors. And autofilters. And conditional formats. And two columns that use themselves as a reference of aceptable values… :smack:

17

I take it as my personal sworn duty to explain to the least technically inclined folks I know exactly how to use the BCC box.

I tell them to put their own name in TO and everyone else in BCC. I carefully explain how all of the addresses are therefore hidden from prying eyes, and how getting on spam mailing lists is averted and how the accidental “reply all” faux pas is avoided.

Besides, if you can’t scroll past it on your computer screen, imagine me using my iPhone trying to scroll down past 300 names. It’s a pain in the butt.

Happily, most folks accept the explanation and make a genuine effort to use BCC instead of TO.

18

I think the tone of this thread is best suited for MPSIMS. I’ll move it there for you.

19

Grrr… Some people here are fond of using Powerpoint attachments for things that could be readily expressed in a Rich Text-formatted email. Not even HTML… just center this, bold that, pick a color, and everyone will know that there’s a potluck lunch next Wednesday without having to clog up the servers with 268 copies of a 158k file.

20

I’ve encountered Windows 2000 installations where Jpegs couldn’t be opened. This was when the cheapest possible installation had been purchased, oblivious of the fact that a library and record office might actually need to start using digital images at some point. :dubious: