Formatting Issues with Google Drive LTI documents?

[bsjohnso]

I have received a report from a faculty member who says one of their students submitted a document via Google Drive and the formatting was changed / messed up upon submission.

Are there any known issues with formatting when submitting documents via Google Drive?  My understanding is that Canvas converts Google documents to a compatible format such Word.  Is it possible the conversion was done poorly?

Full disclosure:  I'm somewhat suspicious that this is not a real issue because the formatting in question involved errors with APA formatting and style.  IMO it looks more like a rushed copy/paste job with mistakes than it does a messy conversion, but I am admittedly more cynical than our faculty.  🙂

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @bsjohnso 

It might be best to have Support look into this specific example or yours to verify. I was able to look into this for a little bit and I did not see any known issues listed on this specifically. 

You are correct in that Canvas converts Google documents to a compatible format such Word. In my experience this can sometimes happen if the student unknowingly had some extra spaces, bullet points, or if they used something like a unsupported font type in the formatting on the original document. Canvas will try and convert it so that the doc viewer can display it correctly in Speedgrader for the instructor.  The different editors can diverge from each other in the handling of more complex formatting, which might be why they are seeing odd formatting in the doc viewer. 

If needed, you could have the student try and save the document from Google drive to their computer and convert it to a supported file type, followed by resubmitting.

Hopefully this helps a little bit! 

-Colton