by Patricia Sellers
It’s nice having a place to vent.
And while I usually use Postcards as a platform to share insights into powerful people and how they navigate their careers, today I need to gripe.
PDF invitations drive me crazy.
You can’t copy and paste the information into your calendar.
You have to write everything manually.
Who has time for this?
I recently aired my compliant to someone who sends more invitations than I: Maryam Banikarim, who announced today that she’s leaving NBC Universal to join Gannett, where she will be chief marketing officer.
“I love advice!!!!,” Banikarim replied after she sent me a PDF invite and I complained back to her.
“So what do u do?” She wrote in response. “Just do them in text in the body of the email?”
“That’s how the simple folk do it,” I replied, adding, “One, you can read it on your BlackBerry. (PDFs are hardly readable on a BB.)
“Two, you can copy and paste the details into any calendar.
“Three, you can save the email without taking up space in your mailbox. (I habitually delete emails with attachments bc they eat mailbox space.)”
Of course, PDFs have a reason for being: to enable the exchange of digital files. More power to Adobe Systems, which created the PDF in 1993.
Adobe offers a PDF Reader to copy and paste data into other documents. But ironically, that information in a PDF (which is an acronym for “portable document reader”) is not naturally portable at all.
Let’s leave PDFs at the office and send our party invitations some other way.
Your view? RSVP…but please, don’t send a PDF.
(Congrats, Maryam!)