[detaro]

To stay with wacky imagery, using Word to do high-quality publishing work is like carving wood with a spoon. It's kinda possible, but takes unnecessarily long, you'll break your tool a few times and the end result doesn't look all that great.

(It's actually used in many publishing workflows, but for the early stages, where all you want is a rich text editor with the ability to do diffs. Typography and layout is done later with different tools)

[FussyZeus]

I've seen numerous examples to the contrary, I'm willing to grant it isn't the best publishing tool out there (far from it) but if you get someone who's properly trained, you can get some very good looking documents out of it.

Also very useful for smaller mass mailers and the like, where you don't have the budget for a full feature publishing suite (or the need).

[detaro]

You are right, I was thinking more in a direction of books, magazines and other more complex works. "high-quality" should probably read "high-complexity" or something