Why Don't College Students Get It?

This will be more of a rant then a blog.

My wife is currently taking two college classes that require collaboration via technology.  They are basically emailing files back and forth.  My wife's laptop is falling apart and we are working on moving all her files over to my old one that is in better shape.  (I got a new Macbook Pro about 2 months ago)  She is in charge of taking all the documents and putting them together into one file.  They are not using google docs like I would but I digress.

My wife, for both classes, has made it abundantly clear that she does not  own MS Office 2008 and that all files must be saved as the older version or .rtf.  These "kids" in her class refuse to listen to her.  She has received many .docx and .pptx files.  Her laptop does not have enough memory to even download converters so she can't open them on her laptop.  When asked why they can't save in the correct file format they tell her that they don't know how.  How can you make it to college and not know how to save in a different file format?   File>save as> click file format>scroll down to the correct format.  DONE!

Her solution has been to get on my Macbook Pro and log in and convert on that computer.  Once we get all her info over to the other laptop she won't have to do this.

Recently she encountered a .odp file.  She had no clue what it was and asked me for help.  I googled it and found out it was an Openoffice.org file.  So, being the techie that I am I downloaded Openoffice and low and behold you can save your files in Openoffice as MS docs!

This has led to an interest in Openoffice.  I will probably do some work in it to see how it does.

If you are a college student please learn how to save file formats!