The Career Place - Creating Plain Text

How To Create a Plain Text Résumé

A résumé summarizes your accomplishments, your work experience, and your education and should reflect your strengths. A plain text résumé does just that - but without any of the formatting that is often used in traditional résumés. Plain text format is the format you want to use when posting résumés on the Internet, unless the Web site specifically says that it will accept a Microsoft Word document.

When writing a plain text résumé, it is extremely important to use terms and familiar industry acronyms that describe your skills and experience because s earches are done on your plain text résumé by the use of document-scanning technology which companies use to quickly and efficiently look for keywords on your résumé to match job openings with qualified job seekers.

Be sure to add keywords and phrases that describe the skills and education required for the position you are applying for. A keyword or phrase can be a skill, location, job title, or specific business. There is a list of keywords located in the spin rack in the library at The Career Place. They are divided into industry and are available to be copied.

Creating A Plain Text Résumé

Open your Microsoft Word Résumé
Click on File, Save As
At the bottom of the Save As dialog box you will see "Save As Type" click on the drop down arrow, choose Plain Text, (notice the .txt extension on the filename)
Click on Save, a box will appears asking if you want to preserve some of the formatting, just click on Yes. **This will not do anything to your original; rather it will create a new .txt document**
You must edit the line breaks of your plain text résumé: Open Word and open the résumé with the .txt extension (You will see the résumé is in a simple text format)
Turn on your Show/Hide feature
You need go line by line and put in a hard return at the end of each line, making sure that no line is over 65 characters long.
Save it to your disk

How To Copy And Paste A Résumé From Word

If you are applying for a job online you may need to copy and paste your résumé on a company's website.

Select all the text you want to copy
Place mouse directly on top of the selected text and right click to bring up the shortcut menu (selected text is highlighted in blue)
Click on Copy from the shortcut menu
Click the mouse where you want to paste your text (Click anywhere including the internet)
Right click the mouse to display the shortcut menu
Choose Paste from the shortcut menu

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