Do you use Microsoft Word to create your documents? Here's why distributing Microsoft Word documents might be a bad idea:
It's wrong to assume that students are going to have Word installed on their PC.
If students have an older version of Word than yours installed on their PC then they probably won't be able to open them. This is especially true if the document filename ends in
.docx. That's the new Microsoft Word 2007 format that isn't compatible with previous versions of Word. There is free compatibility software available from Microsoft (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx) but you can't assume that your users will all have that installed.
The solution is to convert your Word document to a format that everyone can open. And that's just some of the issues with Word. Let's look at the most popular document types and investigate how we can convert them into a format that's just right for Moodle.