Word is a unique blend of effortless power and occasional frustrations that you have probably learned to live with because it’s the only practical choice. It might just be among the most feature-rich apps ever; aside from complex controls over every aspect of document formatting, it offers drawing tools and even integrates Microsoft’s translation and research services. Almost all the features in the Windows version of Word are available for the macOS version, too, except the myriad keyboard shortcuts that ease navigation.

Word continues to gradually shed its old-style dialog boxes in favor of modern, multi-pane interfaces. For example, you can now use a spacious Navigation pane to search for text instead of the cramped old Find dialog. An Editor pane (formerly the Proofing pane) also replaces the old spell-check dialog, too. If you use a mouse, Word’s multiple-pane interface works beautifully. But if you don’t want to move your fingers from the keyboard, getting to these panes quickly is a challenge. Pressing the F6 key lets you jump to one of Word’s panes from the editing screen or ribbon, but these panes still don’t respond to many traditional keyboard shortcuts, such as Alt + Down to open a drop-down menu. Another recent controversial change is the removal of Track Changes balloons in the left margin.

If all you need to do is type a report or a letter, then Word’s ribbon interface gives you easy access to every feature you need. But if you want to customize formatting or use advanced features like fields that contain variables—which you can change throughout a document with a single command—you might need to customize your keyboard or ribbon with components Word doesn’t usually display.

Beginners can get started by choosing among hundreds of elegant, downloadable template designs directly from the app’s New menu. If you want to concentrate on the text you’re writing, a distraction-free Focus mode is available. Just click the Focus button on the toolbar (you might need to enable it from the right-click toolbar) to launch a full-screen editing mode with just a scrollbar and no visible menus. At the same time, advanced users can configure the interface to show a cornucopia of detail. Right-click on the status bar at the foot of Word’s window to get an idea of the dozens of things it can tell you about your document.

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If you haven’t spent half a lifetime learning Word, some behaviors might frustrate you. For example, Word adds a horizontal line at the foot of a paragraph if you type a few too many dashes by default, and then doesn’t let you easily delete it (you need to use the border drop-down menu in the Paragraph section of the Home tab to remove it). And if you want to change the length of the separator line between text and footnotes, you might not easily guess that you can do so only by switching from the default Page view into Draft view and accessing the drop-down menu in the lower pane of that window.

You can stop Word from adding border lines—and other things it does automatically, such as creating numbered lists—by customizing its auto-format features. However, you need to navigate through multiple dialog boxes to find all the options, some of which are inconvenient to manage. For example, you can tell Word not to flag grammar issues as you type, but you can’t turn off the distracting grammar-checking in the Editor pane without turning off dozens of individual options, one by one.

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To help you find features and support topics, Word (and other Microsoft 365 apps) includes a prominent search field in its title bar. For instance, if you can’t remember that you need to open the Ribbon menu’s Insert tab to edit headers and footers, simply type Insert Header, and Word will bring up the relevant menu. However, this dialog won’t tell you where to look on the ribbon for the feature in question or always bring up the correct menu. For example, if you search for the Master Document feature, which lets you build a large document from separately editable chapters, Word takes you to a completely different feature for displaying multiple pages in a single window. The search tool finds the Master Document feature only if you find it first; changing the View setting from Print Layout to Outline causes the Ribbon to show the Master Document menu.

Word also sometimes makes formatting errors. For example, while I was working on this review, I also worked on another document containing many book titles. Word suddenly decided to italicize everything in two pages in the middle of the document, not just the book titles. Restoring the correct formatting took more than an hour. The Master Document feature is notoriously unstable, sometimes losing track of which parts of the document belong in the Master Document itself.

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Unless you’re a Word wizard, you might not know that Word stores the formatting of the current paragraph inside the paragraph mark at the end of it—you can’t even see this mark until you click the Show/Hide button (which looks like a paragraph mark) on the Home tab. If you delete the invisible paragraph mark between two paragraphs (for example, by backspacing across a paragraph break), the format of one paragraph might change to match the format of the other. I’ve wasted many hours restoring formatting that Word changed without warning.

Word’s layout options are sometimes a pain. If you want to change page margins in the middle of a document, you have to create a new section. Doing so, however, disrupts any automatic footnote and endnote numbering. Almost every other modern word processor imitates Word’s nonsensical layout rules, except for WordPerfect, which lets you change margins anywhere in a document without affecting anything else. 

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If you or your organization still has Word files from 20 or more years ago, Word now refuses to open them. Why? Because Word’s old file formats supported macros that run automatically and can potentially damage your system. Other word processors, such as LibreOffice and WordPerfect, can safely open and import these old documents because they can’t run these macros at all. You can persuade Word to open some but not all old documents by changing settings in the Trust Center on the Options menu. 

Word has the most full-featured programming language support of any word processor, the same Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as in Excel and PowerPoint. It’s not an easy language to grasp, but anyone can learn the basics by recording a macro and then studying the resulting code in Word’s built-in Visual Basic editor. LibreOffice and Corel WordPerfect also have powerful macro languages, but Word’s is so universal that you can quickly find help online. Mac users can alternatively use the easy-to-learn AppleScript scripting language to automate Word.