Guelph University gets file formats right!

File formats are the alphabets of the digital age. Some Universities, or at least some Faculties of some Universities still are so culturally retarded to not deal with this fact. They more or less implicitly require students to use only proprietary file formats to study and graduate. A recent, real world example from Italy is here. Luckily, not all Universities are like that.

I found out with great pleasure that the University of Guelph got its requirements for Electronic Thesis formats straight. The list of recommended formats includes OpenDocument and explicitly recommends to not store documents “in any of the Microsoft Office formats (e.g. DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX)”. Kudos to the University of Guelph. Here are some articles on open formats that may help you to understand why this is a good thing and all Universities worldwide should adopt the same practices.