Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union.
As a student I would love if this resulted in more software portability in education spaces. As it stands, half the classes I take only want Microsoft proprietary formats (docx pptx etc), which results in me having to use a giant nasty WYSIWYG editor that supports those formats like LibreOffice instead my preferred tooling (heirloom-doctools / troff, mandoc, or even better, plain text). At least some classes support PDFs, but I’ve yet to see a class that takes plain text submissions. Formatting documents wastes so much time and data for no real reason.
I don’t think there was a time when formatting wasn’t important.
From double spaced text to allow edits, to certain margins, to sectioning, to indexes, to appendices, to properly italicized bibliographical references, to page references etc.
It assists you in conveying your intent as the writer and if standardized it makes it easier for the reader (ie your teacher) to orient themselves with minimal effort. Similar to having a consistent user interface.
Well student like you starts learning how real life world works. Not everything has to go as you wish.
