I wrote a report in Word. If I were to sell this report, what format should I sell it in? I only have Word, but that doesnt seem to be a good option.
I'd use Notepad and let buyers apply whatever format they need. This may be called a RTF (rich text file). I'm not sure, but I know my Notepad is plain and unadorned enough to get done what you're trying to do.
You can always give your ciients several options to choose from. Most people prefer and ask for DOC (Microsoft Word format), but other popular formats are TXT (plain text,) RTF (rich text format,) PDF (portable document format.) Word saves in either DOC, TXT or RTF formats and, if your don't have Adobe, you can download a PDF conversion tool for free such as doPDF, www.dopdf.com
OpenOffice is a very nice, free, open source office suite that you can use to save as .doc or .pdf files so you would be all set for either. It also has a bunch of other formats but those are the two that I use the most. It also has a spreadsheet program similar to Excel and a database application, in case you ever need them. Between this and your Wordpad program, you should be all set to provide whatever format the buyer desires.
I used openoffice. It turned my DOC file into a PDF instantly. That was awesome. Thanks for the tip!!!!
When money allows and if you need to step it up a bit, get Acrobat Pro. That's what I use for all my PDF needs. I distribute my stuff in PDF form (except client work, which is DOCs). Being a Mac guy, I use Pages too. In fact, I'm designing and writing issue 1 of my new newsletter for travel & tourism site owners right now in Pages. I'll be exporting to PDF and distributing that way.
I recommend either giving the PDF format or the 2003 word format. Most computers can read those formats. The newer word formats sometimes can't be read by the older computers.
It's depend on the license that you're going to give to your buyers. If you want to sell it as personal use or giving a resell rights, you should create a PDF file only so no one can edit your report and add their name to it. If you're offering a Private Label Rights to it, where your buyers can edit all the words in it, Word is the most appropriate format to use. Otherwise, you also can distribute it in txt format.