Writing IT Resumes with Word 2010 Part 7: Finishing Touches

Resume Writing for IT Professionals

A note from the author: Over the past year, this series of resume writing articles has focused mostly on resumes from a large-scale perspective, taking a conceptual rather than how-to approach. For this series, though, we deal with step-by-step technical matters that will simplify your resume writing process. This article, and others in the series, assumes that you’re using MS Word 2010. We hope you find it useful.

After you’ve finished your resume’s content and formatting (and proofread it carefully for errors, of course) there are still a few more things you need to do, especially if you plan on uploading the resume in an electronic format.

Don’t worry, they won’t take long to implement—but they could be very important.

One: Remove all Track Changes and Comments

If you’ve given your resume to someone else to edit before sending it out, good for you! An outside reader will almost always spot things that you as an author might not. If they’ve responded by adding comments or track changes to the document, though, you’re going to want to make sure these are hidden before you attach or upload your resume. You can go through the document and simply accept all changes, but you should also take an extra precaution to ensure that you haven’t missed anything.

Directions for Showing Changes

1. From the Review tab, click the drop down arrow next to the show markup command in the Tracking section. This will reveal a small drop down menu.
2. Make sure that “Comments”, “Insertions and Deletions”, “Ink”, and “Formatting” are all checked. This will reveal any changes in the document that might be hidden.

Directions for Accepting or Rejecting Changes

1. Click on the review tab on the MS Word main ribbon.
2. Under the changes section, you will see icons to accept or reject changes. Click on the small arrow under the word accept or reject. This will bring up a secondary dropdown menu.
3. Select the fourth option, which reads “accept all changes in Document.”

NOTE: If you’re not sure you want to accept all changes, you’ll need to go through and accept or reject all changes individually. You can do this by right-clicking on an individual change and choosing accept or reject.

Directions for Removing all Comments

1. Click on the drop down arrow under the Delete command in the Comments section, which can be found on the Review Tab. This will reveal a drop down menu.
2. Select the option for “Delete all comments in document”.

Even if they are hidden, comments and track changes will remain in your document until you take action to delete them. So make sure you don’t get into an awkward situation by sending them to a reader who might have comments automatically enabled to appear in all documents they receive.

Two: Verify Authorship in the File Properties Tab

When you create a file in MS Word, authorship of the file is listed under the file properties (along with things like the date created, and the most recent date of modification). Authorship is established by the program’s referencing who was logged in when the file was created. If you were working on someone else’s computer, and saved the resume to a thumb drive or some virtual service, someone else might show up as the resume’s author, which could get awkward.

Directions for Verifying/Adjusting Authorship

1. Click on the file tab from the main ribbon. On the lower right hand side of the screen will be a subsection that says “related people” (as in, people associated with the file).
2. Make sure you’re listed where it says “author.”
3. If you aren’t listed where you see “author”, right click on the name that is listed. A menu list will pop up, and the second choice from the top will read “Edit Property”. Select this option and a dialogue box will appear.
4. Change the name in the dialogue box to whatever author name you’d like.

This is especially important if you edited your resume on the work computer of your current job. Of course, you probably shouldn’t be working on your resume at work regardless—it would earn you a slap on the wrist under the best of circumstances. If your prospective employer sees how you spend your time on your current job, you might find yourself answering questions from more than one workplace.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject make sure that your user name reflects the kind of workplace identity you want for yourself.

Three: Save in the Proper Format

What constitutes a “proper” format will vary depending on who you talk to and where you submit. Some job postings or databases will specify a list of compatible formats, or make a more specific request. In general, though, you want to save your document in a format that you know will play nicely in the sandbox with the program of your intended audience.

If the job posting doesn’t specify a format, your best bet is to save the document as a PDF, which is a universal format that will preserve the design of the document, essentially by saving it as an image file. This has benefits to saving a document as a .doc or .docx extension, in that a .pdf will not encounter any backwards compatibility issues. After all, you don’t want your carefully crafted resume all garbled in programmatic translation.

Directions for Saving in a New Format

1. Click on the “File” tab in the main Word ribbon.
2. Select the “Save As” option. This will bring up the save as dialog box.
3. Select your desired format from the “Save as Type” drop down menu. This menu can be found at the bottom of the dialog box.

These final steps will ensure that your resume is ready to shine.

This concludes the Writing a Resume with Word 2010 blog series, though we will continue to regularly update this site with additional information about the art of crafting a resume.

More Related Posts

1. Writing IT Resumes with Word 2010 Part 4: Tables
2. Microsoft Word 2010 Updated Features and Benefits
3. The Ultimate Guide: Resume Writing for IT Professionals
4. Mail Merge for Dummies: Creating Address Labels using Word and Excel 2010
5. Mail Merge for Dummies: Creating Address Labels in Word 2007