Do you happen to know if the students are using the Chinese-developed WPS Office (formerly called Kingsoft Office)? It seems to be popular in Asia. I’ve used it before, and it seems reasonably capable in terms of its feature set (more so, I’m afraid to admit, than LibreOffice/OpenOffice), but its interface is vastly different than that of Word, and there are inevitably small formatting glitches that occur when you try to import the files into Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint.
I once was dealing with some formatting problems with an Excel sheet that was edited by a number of people, some of them Chinese colleagues. The file always seemed to get corrupted after editing by the Chinese colleagues, and I finally realized one day (over a screen sharing session) that they weren’t using Microsoft products as I had assumed, but instead were using some supposedly compatible products, perhaps WPS (I never found out exactly what they were using, but from my vague memory of their screen appearance, it looked like WPS).
I was sent some MoE documents recently and was surprised to see the .odt extension. I used OpenOffice for years and it was actually pretty fantastic.
If you want students to give perfectly formatted documents, they can use LaTeX and BibTeX. I taught myself LaTeX for a major CV revision and it looks beautiful! Just kidding though, LaTeX is a bit of a learning curve
Once l bothered to learn the styles functions after like 20 years of using Windows, formatting every document has become so easy. Nobody teaches your students I guess, same as nobody teaches them proper romanization.
