Any tips on Mac MS Office to Win Office/PDF document exchange?

[bazookaman]

Bimwad wrote:
In case it isn't obvious enough already, this relates to a job hunt. Last time I had to do this, the dead tree method was still predominant, and I would have reached for the linen paper first.

I sent out a gozillion resumes in PDF format that I created in InDesign with custom graphics as well as a couple very non standard fonts. PDFs are perfect for just looking. Our career page on our website specifically states to upload PDFs. I think I've gotten 1 out of 50 or so in PDF. The rest are in Word. And they are absolutely horrible.

[Bimwad]

davester wrote:
If you'd said that up front I bet everyone would have told you to use pdf, not a doc or docx.

That may be true, but it doesn't affect your disputed contention that there is an absence of cross-platform issues.

Additionally, I purposely phrased the inquiry to garner feedback about a broader situation, in case there does happen to be a requirement for a submission in Word document format, not PDF, as well as to simply expand my knowledge.

Don't mistake me for one of those quick-on-the-draw posters.

[davester]

I'm a bit puzzled about the contention that there are mac/windows issues with MS Word. I have macs at home and a PC at work, and I am constantly working on MS Word documents using both platforms, and have done so over many versions of MS Word. The documents I work on are also relatively complicated when it comes to formatting, styles, etc. I do stick to one or two fonts though. I'd guess that most of the folks having problems are having font compatibility issues, not cross-platform issues.

[Robert M]

Davester,

You can't separate the font compatibility issues from the cross-platform issues. Fonts have always been a problem across platforms in my experience. A font on the mac and the same font under Windows can definitely result in a skewed output. If times worked the same way on each platform I wouldn't have had to reformat a document sent to me by one of my vendors. As ridiculous as it sounds, the fix to the problem was selecting the entire document, changing the font from Times to a different font and then changing it back again. Upon returning to Times, the document looked and printed perfectly. Crazy but true.

Robert