Has anyone experienced issues with formatting changing in a Word Document upload to an assignment. We have had the formatting change not only in the Croc Doc view but also when downloading the file submission?
I had to create a PDF to solve the problem.
Hi Cara - I have not heard of this before. Please send me an email with an example and I will look into it for you.
I have only ever had a real problem with the Crocodoc formatting. Once I download the file the formatting seems to be as intended. In my business class formatting is important, and I download anything that doesn't look right before I grade it just to be sure.
When the formatting's a problem with the download it's usually because I'm grading on a computer running a different version of Office than what the student used to submit the file. I can't really blame that on Canvas, though.
I have had both. It seemed to stem from students using an older version of Word, or using software other than Word (Open Office, or Pages) and saving their document as a .doc
I tended to only notice the issues when students had highly formatted documents, like equations or tables.
Never found a solution for the older software issue. I started using Google Docs and had students submit URLs. If you can get past the potential "cheating" issues with late alterations, it may work better.
The issue is occurring still as had students and instructors report that formatting is being changed in the upload plus remains when the instructor downloads the file. Besides downloading the doc to a device and formatting there or downloading as a PDF then uploading has there been any discussion on fixing the issue?
@sbartholomew
I can see that you were going to look at this back in 2016, and that we are still getting reports of this over the last few months.
We have just had a two cases where students uploaded word dissertations to Canvas and, on reviewing their submissions, then found that there were minor distortions between their computer originals and the Canvas version.
Could you please advise
We look forwards to your thoughts on what is an important issue for us ....
Hello - We also had this issue come up over the weekend. The students are using APA format for their papers, getting docked points for the page numbers showing on the left in Speedgrader, but when the instructor downloads the document, it shows correctly formatted on the right. After some testing of my own, I found that it seems to be affecting Mac users who are using O365. I tested a Windows user and MS Online but those didn't seem to have an issue with the page number format changing, and this is only affecting page numbers in my testing. What I found as a work around for now, is to have the students save as a .doc file type and upload. The formatting then seems to stick but I don't believe this is a solution, just a band-aid. It would be helpful if this can be investigated further for an actual fix.
I am having the same issue. I'm using the latest version of Windows and MS Word and when I upload a document, it changes the formatting, sometimes just slightly and sometimes quite a bit. I had a resume assignment that uploaded differently than it should have and made me look like I had no idea what I was doing... I see that this issue has been going on since at least 2016. Super frustrating!! I also had an APA reference page that was on a separate page but when I uploaded it, the reference page had been split into 2 pages, with half of it on the last page of my paper and the other half on the actual reference page. So... from some of the replies, it looks like I need to make it a pdf and then upload?? I guess I'll try that, but it would be awesome if Canvas could fix this issue!!
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