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Libre Office default save for documents is .odt, but you can select to save as .doc, .docx etc. How the college can return work as unacceptable is beyond me. Are there no poorer students there? Perhaps the college should be made to pay for the MS Office, they expect students (or their parents) to purchase.

College get round it by saying you don't have to buy ms office or a laptop as students have access to the college computers

...schools routinely stay open late in the evening so that kids can do their homework, and also open at the weekends and through holidays do they?

For their argument to hold any water at all they'd have to have computers available to students at any time a student might want to do homework or revision.

Far simpler for them to just accept a range of file formats (easy enough to do if teachers weren't such lazy dinosaurs themselves) or specify a freeware product.

But the schools get given millions of free copies of MS products which staff can install on their own and family members computers at home - so I guess there's our answer.

I'd go with the pdf production route. This can prevent your work being copied and/or edited without your permission, allows it to be opened and printed by anyone and is FREE.

I regularly receive docx files from the local community council and refuse to open them (I can't anyway) as their assumption that 'everyone' has MS Office is ridiculous when it's the simplest matter in the world to just 'print it' via a pdf printer.

Certainly for documents PDF is the way to go. And for any normal kind of spreadsheets .xls (NOT .xlsx!, which was just a cynical attempt by MS to lock the others out at the same time as forcing everyone to upgrade their MS products) can easily be handled by MS, Open Office, Libre, and many others.

I can't see how the college would know what product, (say a letter etc) saved as a .docx, was used to produce the document. MS Office will recognise it as a .docx file and open it. I'm sure it doesn't say on it "Produced using Open Office, or Libre Office."

I haven't read all the posts but do you know you can get MS office for next to nothing if you're a student. My mate paid less than £40 I think.

I haven't paid for any software in years

They tell you to get ms because automatically they can deal with it when it arrives.
Use what you want but its up to you to make sure its in the format the recepitent has asked for so just make sure its saved with the correct file type.
If you want to use a free suite that's fine but its not the schools responsibility to train you in how to save it in word format.