[uberchet]

It still shocks me how many folks absolutely ignore the features of Word that make it powerful. A huge one is styles.

Before we had semantic markup on the Web, Word was doing something similar with meaningful styles that could drive document structure and whatnot. It's astonishing how often I see people either manually format headings (like, referencing a postit that says "heading: bold, 14pt") or use unstructured styles instead of the actual heading options.

Word will give you a document outline in a "slide out" window that populates based on your headings. It can be HUGELY USEFUL when you're building a longer, more intricate document, and yet it's rarely used properly. It's baffling.

[emodendroket]

I understand why people don't use it correctly -- it requires a deeper level of knowledge, after all -- but I don't understand why I constantly see people in technical forums claiming it doesn't support such a thing.

[uberchet]

I could be flip and say "because Microsoft," but there's probably some truth there. Lots of very technical people reject MSFT out of hand, and for a long time it was pretty easy to understand why, but Word has always been very, very capable.

The first time I used semantic style structure in a Word doc was in Word for DOS in about 1992.