[CLUE-Talk] Marketing Your Linux Skills

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 08 May 2004 03:30:58 -0600
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:

> I'd contend that OpenOffice is plenty good for something as simple as a 
> Resume' is supposed to be.  If you're using features that OO doesn't 
> have, your resume' is waaaaay too complex... and no one is going to 
> bother to ever read the entire thing.
> 
> It sounds like you mixed two topics... OO not being 100% capable of 
> doing OTHER types of documents you need, and the Resume' discussion.
> 
> For those that are reading along, please don't get the impression that 
> OO can't handle resume's -- unless Jed disagrees with this comment for 
> some reason.  Jed?

You're welcome to look: http://rockchucker.com/jsb-resume.doc

A very wise friend of mine once told me that page layout is the highest
level of punctuation. Think about that. Think about the money that
corporations spend with ad agencies to get the look that will sell their
products. Some of here are old enough to remember one particular piece of
advice from years ago, when a resume was something you produced using a
daisy-wheel impact printer, or perhaps even a typewriter -- which was to
use a high-quality paper, or even perhaps a specialty paper (but nothing
gaudy), because it would differentiate your resume from the rest in the
pile. Does anyone recall the advice that you should use an IBM selectric
over any other typewriter, due to the quality of the type over other
brands? How about using a particular type of ribbon (typewriter or
daisywheel printer)?

Over the years, I've spent an enormous amount of time on my resume's
layout. At one point, I even had the assistance of a friend whose
profession was electronic typesetting. I've spent significant hours
migrating from one word processor to another, and I'll tell you that once
you've had your resume produced by a professional typesetting program,
it's difficult to achieve results that compare.

I actually spent quite a few hours attempting to get my resume to look
"right" (which I realize is a subjective criteria) in OpenOffice. It was
very frustrating. By itself, that might not have been sufficient to
dissuade me from using it, except for the simple fact that has been
mentioned elsewhere, that when you do an export to Word, you might not get
what you're expecting. Why spend spend hours fine tuning a page layout,
when your efforts might wind up for naught? Especially when most
recruiters insist on getting a Word document.

I've been through this many times, with various products (multiple
versions of WordPerfect and MS Word, plus AmiPro, and now OO). Conversions
between formats always require touchup. And it isn't only the "ultra
wierd" features. Differences in font width determinations can result in
page overfows and other layout problems. The list goes on.

Now, I'm not saying the OO is incapable of handling resumes. Not at all.
But, when your target format is something other than OO native, that's
were you can run into problems. I've even encountered errors with export
to PDF. So, in a document as important as a resume, no, I'm not going to
use OO, if the end-result must be a Word document. It's not worth the
risk.

jed
-- 
http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/

... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier