ENOUGH. David Levinson at The Transportationist sets hand and seal on a ukase banishing Word attachments.

I have made a decree. I will henceforth no longer accept electronicversions of papers, reports, theses, or dissertations in Microsoft Word format. I have been using the software for far too long, it is a cancer upon our productivity. There [are] a number of reasons for this. Theformat is closed, stylesheets and headings never work right, every document looks different even when it shouldn't, references are never formatted correctly, track changes leads to crashing, the files produced are bloated, templates don't work, embedded graphics are not reproduced correctly, it is prone to viruses, the output is ugly, etc.

You may continue with MS Word for your personal use, and of course in anything unrelated to my supervision of your academic or research work. You probably need to continue to have the software available as others will send you documents in that format.

However, when transmitting a document to me, if you want me to read it, but not edit it in detail, you may use pdf. If you want me to edit it (and this applies to all of my TAs, RAs, Post-docs, and research fellows), I would suggest plain text or LaTeX. For academic papers, I will be using LaTeX. LaTeX automatically produces PDF output.

Note that his ukase addresses reasons for banning attachments that go beyond stopping the rudeness of the "I can't come to class today, please accept my assignment" email, when that attachment may have more viruses than the kitchen floor and it's going to take half an hour to get it formatted. Senders of such messages are revealing their contempt for the recipient. "I can't be bothered to roll out of bed this afternoon, and I have so little respect for you that I want you to spend the next half hour printing out the assignment." Just. Say. No.

Although that LaTeX looks like a typo, or a private freight car owner on acid, the mathematical output is pretty good.