when in school, Office is $25 dollars. Virtually every teaching assistant wants a word document and thats it. they don't want to give a list acceptable formats, they want it standardized.
When I was in school ~ 5 years ago, handing in anything not produced in LaTeX was an automatic fail for the assignment. This was a department rule. I majored in physics though. Never paid a dollar for Office nor Windows (since I don't use them), and I don't ever plan to.
