This is not a new problem Tim Berners-Lee tackled the issue back in the early 1990's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee If you work in XML you can create your own style sheet in CSS and amazingly take control. There is one feature in Word which is handy namely being able to compare versions but http://www.deltaxml.com/ provides a useful solution. So the answer to short comings of Word is move on to XML.