ASCII files aren’t mysteries – in fact, they’re great.

Question: At home I have an old computer — a 486 with 4 megs of RAM — with Microsoft Word 2.0 on it. I’m in the process of sending out my resume and had created it on my home system. I updated it on a friend’s Word 97 program and printed it out. When I got it home and opened the file on my old computer, all I got was complete gibberish. I had to completely re-build and re-type it. Why should I have to pay hundreds of dollars every year for a new version of Word and a new computer, just to be able to use my existing documents? –J.T.

Answer: Your anger is understandable and is shared by hundreds of people I talk to. You’ll be happy to know that many cab drivers like to express variations of your point frequently.

When they find out I know a little bit about computers, they yell curses and wring their steering-wheel-free hands to get their point across. It makes me afraid. That’s why I now tell cabbies that I work for Revenue Canada.

Computers are expensive, though, and the financial prospect of keeping up with the latest software and hardware is very frustrating and costly. But, to be fair, no one can predict with certainty where technology is going. For the technology industry, planning for the future is an impossible guessing game.

Regardless of the politics of technology, I tend to look at the practicality of the situation. What do we know now and can we use it to our advantage? The answer is called ASCII. For the acronym-busters among you, that stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”. ASCII is the predominant character set standard used by present-day computers.

Pronounced “askee”, the standard is a short way of saying a file is a simple text file. The standard was developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to define how computers write and read characters.

Most operating systems use the ASCII standard, except for Windows NT, which uses a standard called Unicode. The ASCII set of 128 characters includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and control codes (like a line feed). Each letter has been assigned a number. A lowercase “a”, for example, is the number 97. An uppercase “Z” is the number 90. A computer uses this numbering system to keep track of text information.

But you don’t need to know all this to make the standard useful. When it comes to resumes, or any text document for that matter, if you save it as an ASCII file, or “text only” in some cases, it can be used in any word processor — now or in the future. The frustrating part about using ASCII, however, is that you can’t define fonts or any useful formatting. But it will save retyping the file from paper.

How do I know all this? I found ANSI’s website and then, when it gave me a headache, I looked it up on CNET’s glossary at: cnet.com/.