Converting Your Resume into a Plain Text File An ASCII or plain text file is not as important today, as most formatting does not inhibit scoring of resumes in ATS today. It can still be useful for applications which require copy and paste into an online form. Quick way to convert your Microsoft Word resume into an ASCII plain text file. 1. Open up your saved resume Word file. 2. Click the SAVE AS button. 3. Rename your file “Resume Text” or something along those lines and of course select where on your computer you want to save. 4. In the file type box under the file name, select the drop down list and select “Plain Text”. 5. Click SAVE. 6. This will open a File Conversion window for you to select some options. Select the “Other encoding” option then from the drop down menu, choose US-ASCII. We recommend you select the “allow character substitutions” but not the “insert line breaks” option. Click OK. 7. Now close your Word document and open the new Text version. 8. Under Format in the Wordpad / Notepad tool bar, make sure Word Wrap is not checked. 9. We recommend you go through the TXT document to update some characters (many bullet points may turn into question marks) and add returns (blank lines) between sections to help you see and read this version of your resume better. Anything that was in columns in the Word version will need to be formatted into one long list instead. The tips in this step will simply help you to use your TXT document more efficiently. Save your file and close. ©2018 – Stewart, Cooper & Coon | Ramsey Penegar, Director of Resume & Branding Services and Certified Professional Resume Writer .