Creating a .txt Version of Your Resume For Online Applications

During our call this past Tues, I promised that I would tell you how to create a .txt version (also referred to as ASCII or Rich Text) of your Word resume.  Why is this important to you?  Well, mainly because you want to be able to control the look of your resume when you copy and paste it into those little blocks that are often find on job boards. 

Now, rather than reinvent the wheel, I am copying here a document prepared by our good friend Jim Sandham.  For those of you who don’t know him yet, Jim is the leader of the ZIP Lunch Bunch, a wonderful networking group that meets every Friday at 11:30am at Strack Farms on Louetta.  If you’ve never been, I highly recommend that all job seekers join this group.  You will learn so much as well as have the opportunity to meet and support others who, like you, are in the middle of a job search.

Anyway, here are the details of creating a .txt resume, straight from Jim:

You’ll need to have an MS Word version already completed in order to change into a .TXT version.  Here’s what you do:
 
1.  Open both MS Word and MS Notepad to full size.  Mark (copy) ALL of the resume text from the .DOC version of your resume.
 
2.  Toggle from Word to Notepad (press Alt/Tab once with your left hand).  Now paste ALL of the text from the .DOC version into the blank Notepad screen.
 
3.  Fix everything in Notepad that looks wrong (columns, bullets, breaks, etc.).  This will take a while, sorry about that!
 
4.  Try to have each line of text not exceed 70 characters.  Count 70 characters to the right for the first full-page-width line of text you have, then hit Enter.  Scroll this line of text up to the very top of your screen.  Put a pencil mark on the frame of your monitor/LCD to show you just how wide 70 characters really is.  Now you won’t have to count characters for each line, and you’ll have a visual reminder for all subsequent .TXT versions!
 
5.  Hit Enter at the end of EVERY 70 characters in order to force each line to NOT word wrap.
 
6.  If your bullets went away, try substituting the asterisk symbol (*, Shift 8).  Put 1 or 2 spaces after each asterisk before the text begins.  Things like bolding, underlining, Italics, and such are gone in Notepad, sorry about that.
 
7.  Notepad doesn’t have a Spell Checker either, so when you’re all done fixing the document, mark all of your newly fixed .TXT text and paste it all into a new blank MS Word page where you can run Word’s Spell Checker.  Once it’s all spell-checked mark all of the text a second time and paste it back into Notepad.  I know, I know, just do it!
 
8.  Save the new .TXT version in Notepad using the same filename as your Word version, except leave off the .DOC extension. 
 
9.  Print copies of BOTH the .DOC and .TXT versions of your resume.  The new .TXT version will be very tall, and will likely exceed two pages, but don’t worry about that, it’s OK.  Compare them side by side, making sure everything survived the transfer process.  Do any final tweaking to make sure they both contain the exact same text.  If you made any final changes, save the document a second time. 
 
10.  You now have a .TXT version of your resume that you can paste into a ‘Paste you resume here’ field on a Web site.
 
Terry here again.  That’s all there is to it.  This process really only takes a few minutes but will have a big impact on the appearance of your resume when it’s not feasible to upload your “official” Word version.

If you have any questions about this procedure, please post them here on the blog so everyone can learn and benefit.  And should you want to contact Jim to get more information on the ZIP lunches, drop him a note at 
jsandham77@hotmail.com.

On this Tuesday’s call, Rick and I are going to devote the entire hour to answering as many of your questions as possible.  We will be focusing on the questions submitted when you registered for the calls.  If you’d like to be sure yours is included, jump on over to www.artofthejobsearch.com/ts1 right now and sign up!

See you on Tuesday!

Terry