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FROM COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE LAWYER WHO WORKS IN WORD 24/7:

Hey, MS engineers who occasionally (once a century) take comments from real-world users:

Get rid of styles and section breaks. Get rid of them. They stink. No one in any law firm knows how to use them. Not one person. Even after 20± years of wrestling with your garbage program Word, not one person in any law firm has mastered their use.

Don't argue about it. What I just wrote is reality.

Because of styles and section breaks, Word remains the worst word processing program I have ever used. WordPerfect in 1996 was better then every single version of Word from then to now. Your new version won't change this unless you jettison those two huge -- and unfixable -- problem areas.

I'm not talking about users who can barely write a few paragraphs in a letter. I'm talking about professionals who crank out and negotiate and heavily revise 100+ page documents. Thanks to Word, they are all so full of computer problems that they look terrible on the page and quickly become uneditable.

Here's something you haven't considered in all this time: Every document gets emailed to another lawyer, who makes a new version, revises it and sends it back. So every single document has conflicting styles from different law firms, different users and multiplying, cascading tech issues. And 95% of secretaries try to fix with manual formatting. The result is a mess every single time. And the worst culprits are styles and section breaks.

I don't blame the secretaries or lawyers. These "features" are too hard to use. Stop arguing - I'm right. You've been sending training tips and hints for 20 years, and they cannot overcome the inherent complexity of your garbage program.

There's more, of course. Various features of Word simply do not work. As one of many examples, Table of Contents is supposed to be programmable to pick up only the first "sentence" of a paragraph (ending at the first period). In other words, if I elect certain settings, it is supposed to pick up only the caption ending with the first period and skip the following text. This simply DOES NOT WORK. Your program fails at its own task.

As a result, we had to buy a special program to make this feature work. But then the next law firm cannot update the TOC because your "native" feature does not work.

"Track changes" is a sick joke. In all the years you have seen the good results of true "redlining" programs, why have you not offered this feature to professional users? No - it would be too usable. Instead we get the latest in web-site-friendly nonsense that we lawyers have never used and will never use.

There is so much more that's wrong and stupid in Word, it would take an endless series of articles to analyze them.

Your new "features" will not even begin to fix fundamental issues with Word, which would never have been accepted in the real world without Windows's monopoly position for the last 20+ years.