How to improve your resume's looks
(MoneyWatch) Sometimes it can seem pointless to carefully format and organize your resume. The best way to share a resume so it looks the way you intended is to provide it in PDF format, but often that's not possible. When you finally submit your resume to a potential employer, you sometimes have to copy and paste it into a text-only Web form or upload it as a Microsoft Word file because the company won't accept PDFs. There's not much you can do about those horrific text-only Web forms, but if you're sharing a Word doc, it's easy to make sure it looks its best.
The problem is that when you share a Word doc, the recipient sees it with all those red and green squiggles indicating potential grammar and spelling problems. It doesn't matter if it's Word just freaking out about acronyms and company names it has never heard of -- they still look abysmal and make your resume look less polished.
It turns out that it's really easy to disable those squiggles on other people's computers so your resume looks the way you intended.
As reported by technology blog Lifehacker, all you have to do is save your Word document in read-only format. When you share a read-only Word doc, Word suppresses all of the formatting recommendations so all you see is the text as you intended it.
If you have a new version of Word, you can do this by choosing File, Info, Protect Document, Restrict Editing. Then choose Read Only in the Editing Restrictions section of the pane on the right.
If you have an older version of Word, go to Tools, Protect Document, Read Only.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user buyalex
