I couldn’t agree more with Chris Smith over at LifeHack.Org who has written an article on Why Geeks Love Plain Text (And Why You Should Too).
The thing is, plain text is something that is just obvious to me — saying you should generally use plain text is a bit like saying you should back up your documents regularly.
The rest of the world, however, seems to be in love with their Office documents. I can’t count the number of times people have needed to send me a short list, like a 5 or 6 point agenda, and they send it along in email as a Microsoft Word attachment.
The only thing I’d add to Smith’s article is that the best text editor I’ve ever used on Windows is still the venerable TextPad. There may be better text editors for coding purposes, but for straight up writing, nothing beats TextPad.
My company it’s not Word documents but screenshots of everything. Cut and paste is apparently too hard. (In fairness, javascript-heavy websites like Twitter and Facebook can sometimes make simple cut and paste a huge pain in the rear.)