Security, Policies & Guidelines

NMSU Software Standards Policy

There are many vendors of office productivity software for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. For example, the departments at NMSU use Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Pages, LaTeX and StarOffice. By far, the most widely used word processing software at NMSU is Microsoft Word. However, rather than mandate the use of a particular office productivity suite, this policy specifies the official file format for electronic documents that are shared between employees. Since most employees use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), and also since the competitive office productivity software can easily save documents in the Microsoft Office formats, NMSU will use Word (.doc), Excel (.xls) and PowerPoint (.ppt) as the standard file formats. All documents that are distributed for editing, collaboration or communication between employees will use these file formats.