How do I type a CV so that someone can read it in Word when I don't have Word?

agrinnall

buglawton wrote: »

Pity the agency didn't think of that themselves!

Quite! Which reinforces my point that they don't have a clue and she'll be better off using somebody else.

unforeseen

jaybeetoo wrote: »

Sending a PDF gives you little or no protection. You can open a PDF in the latest version of Word, edit it and save it as a Word document.

Don't know about other versions but Word 2013 makes a complete pigs ear of converting a PDF.

It's a lot easier to work directly with a Word document and the number of agencies that now expect that format is growing.

It's all well and good saying they should be using OpenOffice etc but in most cases a corporate decision has been made to use Office for commercial/standardisation reasons and that is all that will be allowed

buglawton

No one's expecting organisations to use OpenOffice, we're just suggesting OP and people in a similar situation can. Draw in LibreOffice makes a decent job of editing PDFs for small alterations at least, but that was just a FYI to show that PDFs are not cast in stone.

Swipe

As a 2 decade linux user and strong supporter of open source software I would never use libre office writer for my cv. Any formatting incompatibilities could potentially cost you a job. As already suggested use word online instead.

buglawton

OPs daughter hasn't got the job yet so that may not be her main concern.

securityguy

Swipe wrote: »

As a 2 decade linux user and strong supporter of open source software I would never use libre office writer for my cv. Any formatting incompatibilities could potentially cost you a job. As already suggested use word online instead.

Quite. The reason why I switched from Solaris on my laptop to a Mac was a row with a senior manager when I gave him a presentation done in OpenOffice or something and it crashed his copy of PowerPoint during a customer pitch. My software purist view that applications should never crash wasn't the thought of the moment, and I was told in no uncertain terms to do presentations in real PowerPoint or find another job. It turned out that in Building 17 at Sun the Solaris kernel developers mostly used Mac laptops and looked at me somewhat aghast when I said I was running Solaris engineering builds as my daily computing environment, so I got work to buy me a Mac (which is real Unix under the hood) mostly so that I could use real MS Office. This was before Office online, and before Macs had Intel processors (I think I first used OSX Jaguar, so it would be about 2002) so it was pretty much the only option (was VMware available for Linux then? I can't recall).

zagubov

By all means give word online a try.
If that fails, (it did on my macbook pro) try libreoffice and try to open in in word viewer.
The company are bound to have adobe - the whole point is there's a free version for every machine so you can have a document format that everybody can read. They've obviously got a policy that they want an easy editable document from you.

I'm afraid that MS works is turning into a bit of a historical curiosity but this is the right place for you - the main forum has info on free alternatives.

Strider590

littlewren wrote: »

My daughter is looking to change her job and wants to send her CV to employment agencies as well as elsewhere.

She sent it to one agency a few weeks ago and they e-mailed back, saying they couldn't open it as they didn't have Adobe. They asked if she could send it in Word, but she doesn't have Word on her PC.

This is an out and out lie, the reason they want it in word format is so they can remove personally identifiable information, copy+paste the details into their computer system and also tweak the CV.

No agency will ever send an unedited CV to an employer. They usually have their own specific template.

macman

OP, it would help if you said what software the CV was originally created in before she converted it to a PDF. You don't need Adobe Acrobat to read a PDF, you simply need Adobe Reader, which is installed on almost every PC in existence, and free of charge.
I don't know of any way of converting a Works document to a PDF. Works is effectively obsolete (and has been for years) and is incompatible with all other WP programs.

buglawton

Yes the agency that said "they couldn't open it as they didn't have Adobe" is being 'disingenuous'.