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Why is that an issue? Word is the standard format for this type of submitting papers in and not just educational but at many companies of different sizes as wel

Why is that an issue? Word is the standard format for this type of submitting papers in and not just educational but at many companies of different sizes as well. There is no other format that works as well as Word, especially with change tracking that works when you're working in a group. When I was in college, we didn't have to pay for anything to get MS products. The college paid for a "MSDN" library that provides students with access to many tools in MS's collection. MSDN is in quotes because that's effectively what it was but I recall it under a different brand for our college. For IT students, we also had free access to all servers and client OSes, Office, Visio, etc etc etc. We never had to pay for anything. This was true for the faculty, they also had free access to everything and that's why they require the students to submit specific formats.

_delirium 12y ago
I had the opposite experience in college. Most of my professors were pretty adamant that submitting .doc or .docx (or .pages or .rtf or .tex) files wasn't acceptable. You were supposed to export whatever your source file was to PDF, and submit that. Especially the case in my CS courses. Word was more common in the humanities courses, but I never had a problem submitting a PDF in those either, it just wasn't required. Besides accommodating profs who don't use Word (the CS dept had a small but vocal minority of Unix graybeards), the other main motivation was to avoid having to deal with version compatibility issues. Opening a document created on one version of Word in another version would often (depending on the version pair) mangle some things, especially references and cross-references. And some files just wouldn't open at all. Things might be better with that now; I haven't had occasion to investigate in a few years. In the 2000s, there was a huge mess with the .doc/.docx transition, as well as compatibility issues between the Windows and Mac versions of Office.
holri 12y ago
Word can not even open their old Word version documents correctly. LibreOffice opens them better. Therefore "There is no other format that works as well as Word" is completely wrong. Relying on closed document formats and proprietary Software is shortsighted.

_delirium 12y ago

I had the opposite experience in college. Most of my professors were pretty adamant that submitting .doc or .docx (or .pages or .rtf or .tex) files wasn't acceptable. You were supposed to export whatever your source file was to PDF, and submit that. Especially the case in my CS courses. Word was more common in the humanities courses, but I never had a problem submitting a PDF in those either, it just wasn't required. Besides accommodating profs who don't use Word (the CS dept had a small but vocal minority of Unix graybeards), the other main motivation was to avoid having to deal with version compatibility issues. Opening a document created on one version of Word in another version would often (depending on the version pair) mangle some things, especially references and cross-references. And some files just wouldn't open at all. Things might be better with that now; I haven't had occasion to investigate in a few years. In the 2000s, there was a huge mess with the .doc/.docx transition, as well as compatibility issues between the Windows and Mac versions of Office.

holri 12y ago

Word can not even open their old Word version documents correctly. LibreOffice opens them better. Therefore "There is no other format that works as well as Word" is completely wrong. Relying on closed document formats and proprietary Software is shortsighted.