Formats can be useful, why not? String handling requires presentation, there are many ways you can carry that out, with Formats being one of them. There's nothing that indicates that this is obsolete in anyway, check http://perldoc.perl.org/search.html?q=formats. Perl's fame stems from its string handling capabilities...

Formats are still useful and I believe at one point or the other down your career you might need to require to use any of the formatting interfaces that Perl has...