I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side.
Word and LaTeX not comparable tools and they're not designed for the same job. Comparing them makes as much sense as comparing a bicycle with a skateboard.
I wrote a ~200 page (digital) textbook on 3d Modeling using Word.
Word is incredibly customizable, I had hotkeys setup to do everything I wanted, figures and diagrams manages themselves rather well, and I was easily able to get into a state of flow using Word.
Now it took several days to get Word that customized, but having seen what it can do, I will not call it mediocre.
However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise.
Should be noted I wasn't doing any typesetting or any such thing, just writing the document, I understand that beyond just writing, LaTeX is a far superior tool.
My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.
This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.
Done.
We enforce this and it makes it so much easier for everybody. We also enforce that no one is allowed to mess with the style definitions once they are fixed for the specific project.
It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.
Do some people complain, because they cannot do their personal pet peeve? Sure. Do I care in terms of the greater good for the project or the team? Only in so far as I learn not to want said people in my projects/teams.
Do some people point out specific and relevant flaws in the designe/code/style rules? Sure. Do they count? Hell yes. I love these people in my teams/projects. They know how to understand systems, think systematically and also how to communicate relevant criticism in a productive way.
Feature request: some sort of ML in Word that detects when someone is using spaces to line text up between lines, stops them, and pops up a tutorial on using the ruler.
You can also do a search for double spaces.
It's not that they can't easily mess up. Instead there's a higher barrier to do that - once you're past it, you have more understanding of the system.
Wow. That was my hot tip for Word 1.0 too. I felt they did a rather too good job of hiding them subsequently.
Out of curiosity how large were these documents, and were they completely text or did they contain a fair number of images?
I'm asking since I once ran into a situation with a long and image-filled Word document (150 ish pages, maybe 50 high res images) where there was a noticeable lag when typing and saving would take 30s.
Hope that is useful information for you.
But that is now, and the number of times I've been burned in the past and watched other people being burned, and the distress it is caused those who just want to get their job done and the time wasted; those memories fade slowly.
This points to the real criticism of Word: that its internal representation of text is quite different to its appearance (i.e. WYSIWYG does not imply WYSIWYM) and if you make even a little use of its advanced features and reedit, you will quite likely get a document that behaves perversely. I have quite often seen Word users give up on reformatting a section, cut and paste it into another application and then cut and paste-back-without-styling so that they can reformat from scratch.
The point I was making is that the more of Word's advanced features you use, the more of these kinds of mismatch you risk encountering.
That is the one feature of Word that drives me nuts as a LaTeX and markdown user. I'm sure there must be a setting to change it somewhere, though. Right?
Most students use Word while the exceptional ones have already embraced LaTeX.
The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint.
Most of the extra features I used only required a single command in the preamble to get everything to work out-of-the-box. And I mean everything.
> In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box.
...except when it does not. I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason, or to get images to play nice with their captions so that they break in the same page.
shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word".
"I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason,"
You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all.
Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.
A comparison of FrameMaker and Latex would be a more interesting exercise, I think.