SUBMIT YOUR RESUME TO A WEB SITE

Now that you know from Part 2 what we mean by the term plain text and why it is important to know how to save a document in plain text, it is time to learn how this is done. Again, this is really quite easy, but it is best to watch someone else do it rather than try to read how to do it. Nonetheless, I will try provide some explanation that should work in a similar manner for most systems.

Open up your resume document in your word processing program. Now save the document, but instead of choosing save as you normally would, choose save as. This should open up a list of choices which allows you to save your document in the format of a variety of different word processing programs. Your word processor might put this list under a menu heading something like save as file type:

In our case, you want to find something in the list which allows you to save the document as unformatted text. If you see something in the listing like *.txt, then that is the one to choose. If you see something which refers to ASCII, then that should also work - ASCII is just another term for unformatted text.

When you save your resume in text format, give it a name different than your original version to make sure that you do not get text version mixed up with the word-processor version. Give it a new name such as webres.txt.

Now that you have a plain text version of your resume on a floppy disk, you are ready to send the file via the web. Before doing so, however, you should first try to open it back in to your word processor from the floppy disk. Note that you have lost all bolding, underlining, special fonts, etc. Check to make sure that your resume still has a pleasant appearance. For example, if you used bullets in front of listed items, you might want to add a dash or asterisk in its place if the word processor did not do this in the conversion to plain text formatting. Take a look at how this was done in contrasting my own formatted resume and plain text resume.

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