Microsoft Word

I love the user friendly interface and the grammar checks that are in place to help me write the best possible document. Track Changes is especially helpful for my job, which requires a lot of editing and policy writing. Format Painter has also made formatting so easy and time saving .

I wrote a lot of long sentences, and the grammar recommendations (commas, semicolons, etc.) don’t always seem correct. That’s pretty easy to get around though, since you just have to select “Ignore” to make the red lines disappear.

Word outshines Google Docs or other alternatives in many ways. My favorites include being able to jointly review a document using Track Changes and comments, being able to save and re-use phrases/paragraphs in Quick Parts, being able to copy and paste font style using Format Painter, using the Find and Replace tool to quickly update multiple spots throughout a document, and being able to paste an excel list into Word to replace paragraph marks with a comma to create a comma separated list (or vice versa by pasting a blob of email addresses from Outlook into Word and replacing semi-colons with paragraph markers so I can plop it into Excel and have a clean, list that I can now sort and filter.

While I appreciate the great perks of Word, some of its features can be quite frustrating and finicky. When trying to train other users on Word it's hard to explain "sometimes it does this, but sometimes it doesn't"; I almost have to train with contingency plans. For example, when Word decides you want an extra blank page at the end of your document and despite removing paragraph marks and pressing delete a hundred times and changing the font size to point 1 you end up having to remove a whole line of text from your table just to get it to go away. Or for another example, when you paste text in from outside of Word and it refuses to strip formatting or integrate into your automated numbering despite choosing those options. Or last example, when you're trying to indent just one line and Word refuses to not send the surrounding lines over as well like a little brother who won't stay put. So overall, Word has some great features, but the ones that don't work as they should can be quite annoying.

I love all of the features of Microsoft word I can easily create documents or PDFs and easily edit them within the app.

Nothing this product has been my go to for creating any of my SOWs or papers I needed.