I don’t want to make something fancy–keep it simple, stupid–but Word is a pain in my ass. I think the question speaks for itself–what’s your fave?
Word.
I’ve tried Resume Maker and it does make the ‘starting from scratch’ process a little easier by letting you fill in the blanks. It also formats the Resume properly so you don’t need to sweat that.
What it doesn’t do.
Make a resume interesting. You’re on your own there.
Word is indeed a pain in the ass, but it’s what I use. You could try some DTP software such as Quark XPress, but I think you’d find that even more of a pain in the ass. If you learn to use headers and footers and pre-formatted same-page section breaks, you’ll find it a lot easier in Word.
I had to write one on Friday. Yes, Word was too much of a PITA, so I used Wordpad. It came out fine.
I use Word. I’ve subconsciously come to the conclusion that all software must be wrestled with in order to get results.
Whatever the technical merits of writing the resume with other programs, I’d have to say that you should use Word. This is because many employers will ask you to e-mail them your resume in MS Word format.
A good point to keep in mind, Billdo. I’ll note here that Wordpad saves files in MS Word format.
Mr Paler, ditto what they all said above – gotta go with Word because that’s so often what the employers want, poor misguided sods.
I would be happy to supply any help making Word behave that you might wish for – I’m not a superduperexpert, but I CAN make it do anything you might wish it to do for a resumé. Seriously. emilyforce@yahoo.com .
I just thought I should add here…
According to employers and others I’ve spoken to, they get a zillion resumes in the Word template styles. So they recommend either not using those templates or playing with the fonts and spacing a bit, so that your resume will not look like everyone else’s.
The last time I wrote a resume, I used a typewriter.
You can use whatever you want, but follow instructions. We’d rather have resumes in plain ASCII, so I can cut and paste it into a webform. I know lots of less technical people who are scared of attachments, so ASCII resumes can go in the body of an email.