Rick Segal is a venture capitalist (we almost never write that out) in Toronto. He recently received a business plan in Microsoft Word format (a no-no in the first place, I’d imagine). The genius authors of the plan failed to ‘Accept All Changes’ in Word, thus enabling Rick to view a bunch of their comments in the document. A few gems:
- Scratched out “Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat”, replaced with “Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios”
- “Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
- “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
Make Chanukah jokes? That’s easier said than done. “Hey, uh, if we get our funding near the end of the year, maybe we could get it in eight parts?”
Here’s a simple rule to avoid this phenomenon in the future: PDF that mofo.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
It’s surprising how many subtle hidden-info gotchas there are in various electronic formats, including PDF.
It’s important to know how to sanitize any document format you’re going to use it in this way. It’s not just a matter of choosing the right one.
Ryan: Yeah, I kind of knew that as I wrote it, but was hoping I could squeeze it by without anybody noticing. I get a document format Fail.
One relatively foolproof way: print out the document, then re-scan it. Or save it as plain text and then copy and paste into a new document.
Damn, that’s crazy…
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