Module 2 Email Tasks - 3

"In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?"

The foolproof way is to communicate your intentions with the recipient prior to sending the file to ascertain what software they have and supply them a file format that is compatible. If this is not possible, stick to open formats (as opposed to proprietary) or formats that have a free and readily available reader/viewer/player. A link to this software and brief instructions on how to use it would be polite.

Some examples of open file formats are:

Document

• PDF - Portable Document Format. Formerly proprietary, this format was made 'open' in 2008. It is a container for documents that have text, bitmap and vector graphics.
• ODF - Open Document Format. Open office format for documents. Made popular by Sun Microsystems Open Office suite.
• HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language.
  

Multimedia

• PNG - Portable Network Graphics. Lossless bitmap image format developed to replace GIF.
  
• SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics. XML based file format developed by the W3C.