Digital Assignment Compatibility

As students have more opportunities to submit their work to teachers in electronic form via e-mail and Gaggle, it is important to recognize that certain standards and formats must be used to ensure compatibility with the software available to students and staff at Caro Community Schools. Caro Community Schools recognizes Microsoft Office as it's standard for an office productivity suite. The most commonly used components are Microsoft Word for word processing, Microsoft PowerPoint for creating presentations and Microsoft Excel for spreadsheets. Documents that are being submitted should be in these formats to ensure that they will be able to be opened and viewed on district computers. We highly recommend these programs for home use. Using Microsoft Office at home helps with file compatibility and also reinforces the software skills  that are taught at school. There is a discounted price available to students and staff for Microsoft Office. Current pricing and ordering information are located at http://remc.onthehub.com .

At this time, the majority of teachers have Office 2007 and are able to open any previous version of Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Students creating documents at home with Word 2007 should save them in the Word 97-2003 format to ensure they will be able to edit them at school. If using Powerpoint 2007, save documents a PowerPoint 97-2003 Presentation. If using Excel, save documents as Excel 97-2003 Workbook. 

A no cost alternative to Microsoft Office is Open Office. OpenOffice.org is a multi-platform and multi-lingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute . The website is http://www.openoffice.org . If you do not have broadband  internet access to download the software, we will provide a copy to you on cd in exchange for a blank cd. When using Open Office to create documents for use at school, you must choose to save them in the Microsoft equivalent format.