Microsoft: Where do you want to go yesterday?
Our campus hasn’t moved to the new MS Office 2007 suite yet, but that hasn’t stopped our students from making the jump. The problem is, we have a hard time reading documents students are sending us because they’re using the new Office format, which we can’t read. Apparently there is a converter, but it hasn’t made its way to all our desktops yet; it seems it’s only done on an as-needed basis.
Question: What year is it?
Student: Attached is my assignment.
Instructor: Hi John, I’m sorry, but I can’t open your attachment. Can you please re-send it as an RTF file?
Student: What’s an RTF? How do I do that?
Instructor: It stands for Rich Text Format, and it’s a format that can be read by just about any word processor. Open your assignment, then do a File - Save As, and select RTF from the “Save as type” drop-down box. Or, if you’re using Microsoft Word, you can choose to save it as a Word 2003 document, which I can also open.
Student: OK, here it is.
Answer: 2007. I’ll give you partial credit if you answered any year before 2000.
A brief investigation turned up some interesting dilemmas.
