Dealing with students who are still using MS Works.

I guess Works still comes on some computers. I had a student call earlier saying that they needed to submit a paper to an instructor in Word format. All they had to work with was Works, which never has had Word support for some strange reason (perhaps to differentiate it from Word?) or any common format but RTF. My first thought was to have them download Abiword or LibreOffice, or perhaps log into Google Drive, but then something else occurred to me. This is only one of many possible solutions obviously, but it did save having to download and install software, or navigating Google Drive.


If you have a Hotmail or Live.com account, then you already have a copy of Word, albeit a bit stripped down, available online. Logging into one of these gives you access to SkyDrive. While I am not going to extoll the features of this platform in detail here, it does have the advantage of hosting Office Web Apps.  Since this student already had a Hotmail account, I walked her through logging in, starting the Word Office Web App, and then copying and pasting her document from Works into the App. After this it was a simple matter of saving the document from the Word App and then downloading it. It saves in Word format.

There is absolutely no reason not ot expect students to submit items in specific formats anymore. With programs like AbiWord, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and cloud platforms like Google Drive and MS Skydrive, everyone can have access to software that writes in mainstream formats. What is above is only one possible solution.

The true advantage to these options (other than being freely available), is that students can continue to work in MS Works at home if they are more comfortable doing so, and still be able to give you the format that you request when it comes time to submit the final product.