Many recruiters and employers requesting resumes via email are often cautious about attachments.  Some employers and recruiters may even ask a job candidate to send their resume in the body of the email to avoid the possibility of viruses.  But doing so can leave a job candidate with a formatting mess.  Here are some instructions on how you can create a readable and attractive text resume that can be inserted into the body of your email.

1.    Open your resume and rename it using the .txt extension. Most programs will allow you to do this by going to "Save as…" and saving the document as ASCII text. If you don't see the ASCII option then select "text only with line breaks."

2.    Remove any graphics, including lines, photos and logos.

3.    Replace bullets with asterisks or dashes.

4.    Use the spacebar to line up text the way you want. Do not use tabs or any macros.

5.    You are limited to 80 characters per line.

6.    You can also use Microsoft NotePad or any other text program to make the changes above or any other changes to you text resume.

7.    Once you're done you can save it again.  Make sure you select "Save as…" "ASCII" because most word processing programs will revert to their own extensions (i.e. Microsoft Word .doc).

8.    Once you have completed your text resume, you can copy and paste it into the body of the email.