The Best and Worst Types of Digital Documents

Posted by Kevin D'Arcy on Oct 21, 2016 11:00:00 AM

38570405_s.jpgJust about ten years ago, you wouldn’t have guessed that pen and paper documents would be almost entirely relegated to the dustbin – the age of the digital document was creeping up on the horizon, but it wasn’t at all clear that it would dominate in both home and office life.

With this said, not all types of digital documents are alike – you’ve certainly noticed variations in quality, utility and affordability. In the following, you’ll have an opportunity to see some of the digital mediums used in the past – as well as the more beneficial ones used in the present.

Long-Outdated and Out of the Mainstream

In the early days of the web, Bitmap (BMP) was commonly used; although it could retain the high quality of the original image, the graphics still pale in comparison to the present-day vector image. You could save pictures and text with BMP, but the quality degraded surprisingly quickly as you expanded the size.

GIF is still widely-used for its ability to display motion in a single pane/image; however, anyone who’s used PNG understands the distinct advantages that the latter has. Furthermore, insofar as types of digital documents are concerned, GIF is not a viable method for transmitting important files. For business, you want editable file formats for ease of sharing and for making amendments to a file during collaborations.

Obscure digital formats are usually a bad idea. If you’re sending or receiving one, you have no idea whether or not you’ll have the resources on hand to decipher the document. Go with trusted, widely-used types of digital documents that have a track record of success with the organizations that use them.

Common Attributes of Great Digital Documents

The Internet has all but knocked down geographical borders when it comes to collaboration between team members in different locales. As such, you need document sharing capabilities with your office suite; all the best types of digital documents have this feature. Furthermore, the feature must be robust and reliable.

As explained above regarding the weaknesses of some of the outdated file formats, you want your documents to be editable. Without this feature, collaboration is virtually unworkable – it’s even better if the suite you use has a lengthy file history and saves continuously. This allows restoration to past states in the event of drastic, unwanted alterations.

In fact, even if you don’t anticipate changes to a document, it’s still a good idea to opt for an editable format – you may end up changing your mind, and the file history option always makes it possible to return to the previous state. Only in rare cases should you choose non-editable digital formats.

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