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Dan (DWallach), you're a professor. Is this a typical response or simply a professor being hard to deal with?


Seems I'm a little late to the party here. Generally speaking, when I'm having students submit things, I require PDF or HTML, since those are universal and can be easily graded by grad students using whatever platform they've got (we've got a lot of Linux and Mac around here). PowerPoint is a bastard format. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the bullets and other dingbats change into random garbage when you move PowerPoint from one machine to another. Changes in fonts between Windows and Mac also cause layout hell. PDF guarantees that you see everything how it's meant to be seen, although you do lose any animations.

Furthermore, if the professor in question is in the Humanities side of the house, they may be running a University-administered machine. At Rice, anyway, that means lock-down mode, and the prof would be simply unable to install software without filing a bug with the help desk and waiting a few days for somebody to come around and do it. In a situation like that, it's eminently reasonable to ask the student to submit something in a more legible format.