[darkteflon]

Former lawyer here. That most commercial contract work is done in Word is a source of major frustration and wasted time for many lawyers. Others are simply unaware that there are any authoring/editing paradigms that allow one to separate the drudgery of getting document formatting just-so, from the actual value-additive work.

Unfortunately there’s no realistic solution to the lock-in, so wrestling with broken paragraph formatting, mismatched text sizes, auto-numbering errors, etc at 2am before a client deadline remains the norm. One of the most frustrating parts of the job.

[EasyMark]

I never have those issues, but I'm the only one editing my stuff. I use styles religiously when I use Word for professional documents. It takes a little more time and effort but pays out over the long haul.

[pasc1878]

But very few people do that.

I was on a project and complained heavily that we were not using styles,. The complaints got my manager to state that another person would do all the formatting. Of course the other person left befor the end and I had to do all the formatting.

[Spooky23]

That’s why. If you use styles and embrace sanity in general, it’s fine. But word is like Perl, there’s more than one way to do it.

Paste additions to the middle of a numbered list from legacy documents that break the number sequence and use custom fonts altar create weird problems? Sure.

Allow sociopaths to format text using a series of invisible text boxes? Sure.

Decide to randomly lose the names of editors and contributors? Sure.

[kayodelycaon]

Do you use the comment and change tracking features of Word?

I write stories and everyone uses Word documents for editing.

[carlosjobim]

What's the problem with Word documents if you open them in Word?