I am a long-time and relatively proficient MS Word 2010 user who used to use WP 5.1 for DOS way back. While word processing under Windows is a lot easier than under DOS, and Word works great and is easy to use for simple documents, I find that large, complex documents with illustrations and complex paragraph numbering makes Word unstable, difficult to figure out and short of certain functionality. This has made me look for alternatives for my own start-up business.

It would have helped if Word had good context sensitive help. For example, if you're in a dialogue box and click on the question mark button or hit F1, you get a general help page for Word. And when you try to search for your problem, you get lots of different Internet hits with varying quality and overlapping content. This really hurts productivity.

One specific functionality that still is missing in Word 2010 even though WP 5.1 had it, is the ability to properly locate illustrations vertically tied to a paragraph. In Word, if editing earlier in the document places the paragraph close to the bottom of the page, the illustration goes below the bottom margin or even off the paper. I have tested SoftMaker SoftWriter 2012, and it has the same problem. I have also tested OpenOffice Writer 3.4.1, and that program does it right (moves the illustration to the next page if it doesn't fit above the bottom margin) if you tick 'Follow text flow' in the dialogue box. I have not (yet) tested the rather pricey WordPerfect X6, but I expect that this still works right in WP like it did in WP 5.1.

By the way, SoftMaker Office has great help which is context-sensitive and also easy to navigate by topic. OpenOffice has acceptable help which is context-sensitive but a little clumsy to navigate by topic.

Oh, and SoftMaker spreadsheet program falls short of MS Excel, which is great. I haven't tested OpenOffice spreadsheet program much yet. I may continue using the rest of MS Office but use something else than MS Word for word processing.