Thanks heaps Anne Marie: this is one majorly useful article for those of us toiling at the ID end of a publication workflow. I would love to read more about MS Word from an ID user's perspective. Many folk like me only know Word as an often problematic supplier of raw material in the design process.

As a long-time, windows-based designer, I was (and still am) a dedicated WordPerfect user, and I still choose it over Word whenever I can. (Reveal Codes is one of the seven wonders of the modern world for debugging text), but I still rely on it to convert Word tables into something more useful since it really does contain sophisticated Excel features in a word processing environment. You can both add across rows and down columns in two mouse clicks, not to mention far more complicated stuff (I use percentages a lot). Documents convert back and forth from Word to WordPerfect pretty cleanly.
Another WordPerfect feature that runs rings around Word is Sort, which I use for creating sophisticated alphabetized or alphanumerical lists (think indexes).
And finally, Word documents are (or at least were -- I haven't had to do this for a while) breathtakingly insecure. A while ago I had to work with some letters from a high security source. I was unable to open the documents in Word, so I opened them in a text editor that opens anything, and what did I discover but the (probably confidential) deleted text of a previous letter that had been stored in the file for "undo" when they copied and pasted in text for the new letter. Moral: I will never send a Word document to someone that hasn't been comepletely "scrubbed."