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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

How well does it run?

Excel, Word and PowerPoint run as well as they did on Windows. All the main functionality is very stable. Wine even integrated the icons and mime-types into my DE.

It is only very occasionally I hit any critical error. It has only happened when trying something obscure, like "Microsoft Maps for Excel".

I haven't tried Outlook 97 yet.

But poor old Access won't even get off the ground. I'm guessing due to some ODBC driver too stodgy to have a sip of Wine.

Interesting. My main use case for using Word would be for my CV. Since I don't want it to render a single bit different than on a recruiting manager's screen. Unfortunately PDF still seems to be a bit of a disadvantage in some cases.

If you install modern fonts and get busy with the drawing tools, you can produce a modern styled CV. I would say the chances are good if you made a modern one and saved it as a .doc it would open identically in modern Word. (Though, I have already some ideas for a blog post on this, I might try this scenario too and see what modern Word makes of it!)

I actually used Word 97 to write a report for university. I switched Arial for Calibri and they were none the wiser.

I have never heard anyone have problems with a PDF CV. If that's a disqualification reason... I don't know.

This is speaking of IT of course; if you are talking to a small business doing woodworking or whatever, all bets are off on what tech they can and cannot handle. I'd still bet on PDF more than doc(x), though, since maybe they don't have an expensive Word license but PDF should render in browsers.

It is actually not for employment, but as I work as consultant / contractor I have these agencies between me and possible customers. They enjoy to edit out any contact information from CVs to act as middlemen. It sucks but does not reflect on the actual assignment in the end.

Oh, okay yeah if they want to make edits, then giving them rendered output is indeed not the nice thing to do.

There are still corners of the world where docx is the One True Format, and PDFs make you seem like the weirdo. I can easily imagine it being too different/difficult and a candidate being rejected from the enormous pile for that. The Internet has made it far more common to get outsized responses; eg 800 applicants for 3 positions, with no easy way to sort through them all.

This doesn't quite make sense to me. Sending your Resume in .docx is kind of a terrible idea, and I've seen countless people running mainstream Windows version getting bitten by this. On top this, in my experience it's *much* easier for me as an interviewer to review your resume in PDF rather than docx (even if I have access to MS Word or Google Docs). I have never seen any company or recruiter (in the US) who prefers docx but I've seen multiple companies (including my own) that prefer PDF.

So, someone going out of their way to type their resume in wine word, only for it to be a scrambled mess... I would strongly recommend you not to do this. If you're emailing your resume and you absolutely want to go ahead with your plan, please consider adding both the pdf and docx. Good luck!

The idea to send it in both versions is actually very good. Thank you!

Ah I see. Never worked as a consultant/contractor so I wouldn't know!

Outlook 97 was the last decent version (and I think the last version to fully support Lookout, whose ability to index public folders before people thought ACLs were necessary resulted in some interesting discoveries).

Then again I have (reasonably) positive memories of MS-Mail. The version of desktop Outlook I have to use (2016?) is a horrible buggy mess.

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