> You're right. My place of work isn't the real world at all.

Exactly, you seem to base your assumptions of how the whole world uses Word 
based on how the people in your company use it.  You regularly present lots 
of evidence about how screwed up IT is in your company, so don't you think 
that there might actually be other companies out there that are a tad more 
organised in this sort of thing?

> As an aside, at work we try to avoid document templates to the maximum 
> extent possible because they cause Word to crash.

See, it's comments like that that really show a completely screwed up IT 
mentality.  Does it not occur to you that something else might have been 
causing the crashes, given that it is likely millions of people actually do 
use templates daily without Word crashing?  How on Earth do you keep 
consistent looking documents without using templates?  Don't you think it 
would be headline news on every IT website if nobody could use document 
templates without Word crashing?  Don't you think MS would release a fix 
straight away if there was such a problem?

> I'm also 98% sure none of the Word power users know about styles.

WTF?  You really need to send your "Word power users" on a beginners course 
for Word.  And be concerned that they are happy to manually change the font 
styles for every heading/caption/sub-heading and never ever consider that 
there might be a faster way to do it.  What else are they doing in their job 
so stupidly that they could be doing much more effectively?

> Now at least we come to some things Word 2.0 didn't have - specifically I 
> don't recall it having VB. Or address label creation. Or forms. I'd be 
> really surprised if anybody out there actually uses VB though.

Googling "VBA in Word" gives 5460000 results, seems like a lot of people 
have something to say about it.

> Because M$ tells us that "Word is easy". Why would you need training for 
> something that is "easy"?

I think it says more about the mentality of the user if they don't seek to 
find more efficient ways to work.  Not just in using software, but in other 
things too.

Even though we did two MS Office courses at work ages ago, I still quite 
regularly think to myself "oh there *must* be a quicker way to do this, 
surely someone else has needed to do this before" - and 99% of the time, 
sure enough, there is functionality built-in to Word/Excel to do this. 
That's what is the difference between Office 2008 and Word 2.0 / WordPad / 
whatever.

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