The situation you described about your professor shows that vendor lock-in
starts at the schools. Microsoft and Apple know this and why they push so
hard to give schools discounts with their software if money is an issue.
Whether it is kindergarten or grad school, the staff is trained on the
software and in return wants the student's work to use that same software.
That is never going to change unless the school board mandates it. Of course
they wouldn't as it would piss off their partnerships with Microsoft.
You know the drill... 12pt Times New Roman in MLA format with a certain page
length and saved in the .doc format. If you print your work, the format isn't
a problem but many courses have students upload their files to areas like
Blackboard to share with others. Some teachers may take an ODF file as an
unreadable file and could penalize the student's grades as a result.
As I told many people... its not about learning Excel: it is about learning a
spreadsheet program. Even if you do use Word or Excel, saving in OpenDocument
is a good start. The implementation of ODF 1.1 in Office is spotty, but so is
Windows 7's Wordpad and Mac OSX's TextEdit's support. Anything advanced with
that format in those programs gets lost. At least the support is there at the
OS level. It is too bad that iWork has to be the odd man out.
