On the other side of avoiding it, I started college using OpenOffice, which worked fine until one day I got queried from a professor about why I had opted to go with a 5 column layout for the assignment submission when he opened it in MS Office for Mac. The content was all there, so it clearly wasn't a case of "Oops, corrupted, let's resubmit after the date".

The doc in OpenOffice that I had made had the most basic formatting, just headings, a table of contents, paragraphs and the required double line spacing. Certainly no columns of any kind.

After that I switched to PDF submissions for every module where they would be accepted.