Resume document formats

There are many ways to format a resume on a computer. We'll be taking a look at the ways to save the document that you've just created. There are a few others also but we'll focus on these as they are the largest ones in use. Let's go through these here:

.doc is the format that is native to all versions of Microsoft Office from 97- 2003.

.docx is the format that is native to Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010.

.pdf stands for Portable Document Format and is produced by Adobe.

.odt is one used by OpenOffice for documents natively.

.txt is a text file, these run on any computer, most mp3 players & most cell phones.

For many reasons when it comes to a resume I recommend that you use the Microsoft Word 97-2003 for the output. It's extremely portable as it will come up on just every computer and many smart phones. It also works on just about every resume upload system worldwide which is great. I've begun to also see some resume systems will also accept OpenOffice and Word 2007-2010 formats. Of those two OpenOffice is the one that seems more resume systems use at present. Probably why is that OpenOffice is free which also means that it's going to be used by even more systems. A note on the Word 2007-2010 format, it can add extra spacing to your resume so I don't recommend it.
Though I've seen recommendations for having a PDF version of your resume on hand I can't recommend it. There isn't too many systems that accept that format but it works very well for printing your resume. You get for output exactly what you have seen on the screen of your computer which is nice. Now, let's talk about the very last one which is text. This is extremely useful for sending your resume in an email. You just copy the entire document and paste as the body of your email. I've responded to many job openings this way, two of which I have worked at.

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