With Excel its: Do you know arrays, UDFs, Solver, lookups, mastery over chart design, and cell formatting. With word it's basically: Can you do a mail merge and a table of contents? Congrats. You're an expert.
Most people don't use styles, or use them improperly, or modify every instance randomly. They use forced line breaks to adjust page breaks because they don't know about forced page breaks, or the "keep with next" paragraph setting. They've never heard of non-breaking space. They align numbers with spaces. They don't know that you can (and should) have accented capital letters in languages such as French, and that there's a specific option to set for that. They don't understand footnotes, type the footnote text in the text itself and wonder where it's gone after page reflow. They don't know anything about ToC, or ToC formatting. They are very surprised to learn you can type in italics directly using underscores. They can't navigate a paragraph or a line using home/end buttons. They select text with the mouse, which takes like two minutes in a long document, instead of 500ms when using CTRL+Shift + End/Home, or CTRL+A.
And let's not talk about composition. Alignments. Bullets, bullet types. Margins. Sections. Checking for rivers.
I mean, for white collar work this is the equivalent of making sure someone knows how to use a semi-colon. It's a "skill" in scarequotes because basic proficiency is assumed and 99% of the time you don't need things to be pixel perfect and if you do you can figure it out on the fly.
Compare these things to, say, knowing when and how to use Excel Solver to give a non-inferior solution set. Or fiddling around to integrate remote data feeds into a sheet for daily automation.
But yes, sure, most Excel users also have no clue you can import data using SQL or that you can set calculation to manual and calculate with F9.
A cardiologist that pays someone to follow them around all day for the computer stuff makes 5% less than the one that DIYs it all. (And possibly makes up for it in increased billing, but it can slow things down too, especially as the interfaces improve).
There’s also a level of smugness about knowing a solution off the top of your head vs. Googling or researching it using subscribed DBs (by yourself or by your “law librarian”).
Personally, I’m happy if my doctor googles a solution and goes by a recent review article written by specialists in that area rather than “top of heading” with what they learned in a Continuing Ed session, marketing session or school (if it was long enough ago).
You can figure it out on the fly, not everyone has that reaction to unfamiliar software
Also, using styles and knowing about "keep with next" are really important for any job that involves producing documents.
This is (one of the reasons) why I write everything in Markdown and export it to Word or PDF with Pandoc. There's no temptation to "fix" the formatting as I go along; it's just text, and I can apply a style sheet after the fact.
One of my biggest irritations in Word is that Ctrl-A/E don't go to the beginning/end of line. These key combinations (originally from Emacs) work on almost all input boxes on macOS. (IntelliJ is also an offender in this regard. Basically, any program that implements their own text boxes.)
I also make these shortcuts for beginning/end of line in Word (although the ability to add custom keyboard shortcuts seems to randomly disappear in my copy of Word).
Word, not so much.
Sadly, it's a one-way trip, and collaborators usually can't be talked into adopting this arcane way of working.
But the emacs keybindings work flawlessly :-)
Outside of Reddit sources, Creative Bloq also suggests Affinity Publisher and QuarkXPress, but I can't immediately tell if the rankings are paid for or influenced by advertisers [2].
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/gdqrux/thinking_o...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/7p9s8q/shou...
[2] https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-desktop-publ...
The vast majority of print-interior typesetting is being done with Adobe InDesign.
Some publishers (still) have their own system that does not use Word styles - usually using ASCII tags inserted into the content. These are often legacy approaches dating from the 1980s, but if it works why change it?
A few have begun to use Markdown-based systems, but this is very rare in commercial publishing.
The vast majority of author-to-editor-preproduction workflows are done in Microsoft Word. Some publishers (including the one I worked for, and the ones I work with now) use Word styles for all content formatting. Part of the editorial "pre-production" task is to take what authors give us (font formatting with bold / italic, paragraph formatting with returns and tabs) and convert it to styles.
To be fair to people who don't know (I agree that it's an important skill): It's kind of Word's fault. Direct formatting is easy while proper styling is hard and undiscoverable AF. People would probably immediately get it if the difficulties were reversed.
What does this mean? I'm not finding it on Google.
Also you don't want to be using ad-hoc styling in Word to begin with. It's definitely an anti-pattern.
But if you don't like it, don't use it.
(There are ways to configure the keyboard to change the arrangement of keys to best suit your needs. I used to do this, but the big drawback is that if you change machines all your habits are wrong and you waste a lot of time finding the keys again.)
My workflow requires that I send out actual mail, in which case the concatenated result doesn't matter once printed, but I'd like to keep a copy of the individual docs for record keeping.
If they even know what you're talking about, then that's a quick way to skip the rest of the probing and assume they know (or can quickly figure out) the rest.