Given that we spend so much of our time these days inspecting and sharing digital information, it is amazing how little we think about the way that all those precious facts are arranged into long series of zeroes and ones for us. In order for information to be successfully transmitted electronically, the receiving device, software or application needs to understand the format that the transmitting computer is sending it in. When you think about it in those terms, you may begin to consider it a miracle that one computer ever understands what another is saying!
The success of our digital information revolution is underpinned by the communication protocols of networks, and the file formats that software generates. But sometimes there can be complications with sharing files, and so here are a list of tools and techniques to help you when things aren't going quite according to plan.
File format conversions
There can nothing more frustrating than when you know, or at least you think you know, that you have the right software to open a file, only for it to resolutely fail to work. A classic case of this is with Microsoft Office formats. From 2007, Microsoft introduced the .docx file format for Word, superseding the .doc filetype that had come before it. Unfortunately, we aren't all blessed with the ability to upgrade our software at will. If colleagues or contacts who'd upgraded to the latest version of Office were sharing files with you, you'd find you couldn't open them. Fortunately Microsoft issues a compatibility pack for previous versions of the software, but it isn't well known (http://digbig.com/5bcgne).
There are other alternatives, though, when you are having problems with a particular file format. OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) is an Open Source suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation software. The software is able to open many file formats, convert the contents into an OpenOffice document, and then save the output as a different type of file. It means, for example, that you can use OpenOffice to open a spreadsheet designed for Lotus 1-2-3, and save it as an Excel file. OpenOffice isn't always able to preserve the precise formatting of a document, but you should be able to use the results of files opened and converted in this way.
The Google Docs set of online collaborative office tools is also useful for this. If you have a Gmail or Googlemail address, try sending yourself a tricky file as an attachment. If it can, Google will offer to open up the file as a web-based document, and you will often be able to save the resulting document in a more common format that you can use, or at the very least output it as a PDF or to a printer.
Another online alternative is Zamzar (http://www.zamzar.com/). This service allows you to email them a computer file, and then choose the output format you wish to receive it in. Options include converting complex formats like audio and video files (for example turning a WMA file into the .m4a format) as well as text documents and spreadsheets.
Sending large files
In the real world it is a prohibitive price that stops people sending really large packets. In the virtual world, some types of electronic mail can equally frown on large amounts of data. We aren't quite in the bad old days of the mid-90s when someone sending you an uncompressed image file could completely clog up your inbound email, but many free web-based email services and corporate IT infrastructures restrict the size of files that can be sent via email. There are a couple of ways around this without resorting to attaching a USB memory stick to a carrier pigeon.
YouSendIt is one such service at https://www.yousendit.com/. It allows you to upload a large file to their servers, and then send an email to a contact or colleague, which includes a token allowing them alone to download it. The free version has some restrictions on it, but if you find yourself frequently in the situation of sending out large amounts of data, there are paid for options with additional features. DropSend is a similar service (http://www.dropsend.com/) and a web search for a generic set of terms like ‘send large files' will turn up a multitude of companies offering similar facilities.
Remote backups and sharing
There are a couple of services that take this idea of sharing large items in multiple locations further. Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/) describes itself as ‘like a magic pocket for your computer'. It is rather like a shared folder, which is available on any machine that you have installed the software - and it keeps the files you put into the folder synchronised and backed up. It means that you can have access to the most up-to-date version of a document on your home computer, work PC, laptop and phone, and the data is also available via a web interface.
Backblaze (http://www.backblaze.com/) works on a similar principle, but for a small monthly fee, will silently back up everything on your computer to a remote location. In the event of a problem with your machine, you can purchase an external hard drive or DVD featuring your key data, or restore the files over the web. IDrive (http://www.idrive.com/) and Mozy (http://mozy.co.uk/) offer comparable services.
Using the simplest possible file format
Software vendors are always urging IT departments to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of their wares. New features mean new complexity, and don't always retain backwards compatibility with previous file formats. And the more complex a file is, the more likely it is over time to become harder to read or process.
Which is why it is often good to keep a copy of your data in the simplest format possible.
This is particularly useful if you are hoping to have any of the data contained within processed by another piece of software. It is something that I always advise journalists when they are preparing data to go into a data visualisation, or a database program that will analyse their findings. It is always much easier for low-level programming languages to handle plain text, CSV (comma separated value) files, or simple XML formats, than it is to know how to parse that precise version of Excel file from 1998. Consider keeping backups of your important data exported in a simple format.
I hope that some of the ideas above will help you if you ever find yourself in that tricky situation where your computer is telling you that it cannot do something because 'x is the wrong type of file' or 'file y is too large'. If there is one thing that I hope I have shown you, it is that if one piece of software can't understand a file you are trying to use, the chances are that there is another piece of easily available, and often free, software that will.
Martin Belam is Information Architect for guardian.co.uk. Before joining The Guardian, he worked as an Internet Consultant with organisations like the BBC, Sony, Vodafone and the Science Museum. He is contributing editor for FUMSI magazine, and blogs about information architecture and the media at currybet.net
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Given that we spend so much of our time these days inspecting and sharing digital information, it is amazing how little we think about the way that all those precious facts are arranged into long series of zeroes and ones for us. In order for information to be successfully transmitted electronically, the receiving device, software or application needs to understand the format that the transmitting computer is sending it in. When you think about it in those terms, you may begin to consider it a miracle that one computer ever understands what another is saying!
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