Forum Discussion
Formatting Changes after Uploading a Word Document with Images
I have been using Teams to hold virtual office hours with my students in my Business and in my Technical Writing Class. This has been working when the documents are simple and straight text. However,...
SquishySamson you are right... we have resorted to saving the edited doc as a pdf before uploading to Teams...
And THIS still doesn't even work all the time. Just got done with my 2nd semester in grad school that was absolutely the WORST semester I have EVER had in undergrad or grad school to point my professor I think thought I was purposely ignoring her feedback asking me to start getting help at school writing center or I would fail grad school. I had NO CLUE what she was talking about until the last week of class other than my papers written and edited in Word , were coming out as complete mess looking fragmented and spliced together at different points of autosave as I worked on assignment. No matter I would ALWAYS use review to check writing mistakes. I felt like a complete idiot when one assignment she was really frustrated with saying in feedback my writing looked as if I used the APA paper template with embedded info directions on each page Microsoft puts on there- and I just randomly copy and pasted my written assignment over embedded content pre-filled not erasing any of the embedded content. No APA formatting with margins and on and on and on. Before I sent assignment after saving- the paper was formatted , edited and professional. Why does Word not tell users any of this stuff in troubleshooting section of app program??? Btw- when submitting no matter a pdf or Worddoc- and submit it through the Brightspace online Dropbox that is mandated for assignments to be submitted through- brightspace screws it up more the professor said. Almost was dismissed from grad school over these ridiculous issues no one at Microsoft bothers to mention or have fixed over the years! I'm beyond angry all the stress of trying to figure out what was going on and my teacher thinking I was purposely sloppy or just a complete idiot.
- As a university writing instructor, whenever a professor tells students that they need additional help, those students should immediately make an appointment with the professor to find out exactly what the problem is. In your case, if you had done this, your professor could have shared with you how your documents were appearing on her end, and you could have worked together to find a solution. I know this can be a challenge if your course on online instead of face 2 face (F2F), but this is what you have to do.
I am not familiar with the learning management system (LMS) you are using; however, I can tell you that other LMSs have the same problem. At my institution, we use Canvas, and sometimes, submitted work gets screwy, even with simple Word Docs. Sometimes, the indentation of the first line of a paragraph ends up not indented. Just this past semester, students uploaded an extensive PowerPoint for a collaborative assignment, and it seems as if Canvas could just not handle the size of the document--Canvas altered ALL of the formatting--I mean everything: the font, the shapes, the pictures, the reference list. Canvas also does to play well with Apple devices. Students who use PCs seem to have less problems with the LMS.
I would be really proactive with your next set of professors.- So, blaming the person with the problem caused by MS?
Have you tried to switch off automatic saving of the document in Word? We have experienced some of the same problems with unwanted chances in tables.
However, we have a large Sharepoint document library with thousands of Word documents which we convert to html to be shown in a browser. These Word documents never change formatting although some of them are heavily loaded with tables. The difference is that we do not use automatic saving - this could perhaps be a reason for not seeing the issue here? Also, they cannot be edited by more than one editor at a time.
Kind Regards
Niels
