As for word, I will happily piss on its grave (and that of every other pisspoor clone[3]). It's a bloody awful tool for word processing, let alone anything else, it can come back and play when it's learned to typeset properly.
Seriously. If word could do (0) real support for character/paragraph styles, as the primary way of changing document appearance instead of a badly tacked on afterthought, (1) proper kerning and ideally some automatic kerning of badly kerned fonts [and damn, many of the fonts that ship by default with Windows have *horrible* kerning tables], (2) proper paragraph layout with a good hyphenation/justification engine, (3) typographic layout features like hanging punctuation, optical alignment, etc., (4) proper support for essential typographic features like small caps, ligatures, alternate glyphs, etc., (5) reasonable layout of embedded figures, text boxes, and other elements that didn’t make the user start bashing their head into the wall, (6) proper support for multicolumn layouts, (7) proper support for footnotes and endnotes that don’t look like garbage, (
how can we forget the monster that is Clippy, and all the other bull**** “helpful” wizard type features which deserve nothing more than summary execution, &c. &c. &c., then it would start to be barely usable for making real documents.
That still wouldn’t fix the problems like: ****ty default typographic/layout choices, layout bugs, crashes, non-obvious data-loss without any warning, exposing your deleted text to savvy third parties, utterly dysfunctional collaboration features, undocumented and terrible file formats intentionally broken to prevent other software from interacting with word files, incompatibility between files saved in different versions of word (such that old files no longer lay out the same on new software versions, e.g.), macro features that allow a text document to run arbitrary code and root your machine, a history of anti-competitive market behavior that pushed out all other competing software and left the market stagnant for 20 years, etc., but at least it would be possible to make a presentable document.
Word is software designed by committees of people who had no taste and no respect for written language. For all the billions of dollars Microsoft has made from selling it, its inability to handle basic typography is basically inexcusable. It’s amateur hour. Word has basically doomed generations of Word customers to crappy looking documents for no reason. [And note, that also goes for Open Office, Google Docs, and so on, whose mission in life seems to be to clone crappy MS software as closely as they can get away with, and add no original ideas or fix any of the broken parts.]
It’s especially too bad, because up through Word 5.1, released in 1992, Word for Macintosh was a pretty nice piece of software, considering the constraints of the machines that it ran on.