My word processor is driving me nuts

Even though I worked for almost four years for a company that used Word (Mac version) as its standard word processor, I never really did much with it. For one thing, I cut my teeth on WordPerfect, and never felt much like learning a whole new app. For another, I did nearly all my "writing" at that company directly in a web page template using Dreamweaver, or in plain text in a text editor. So I basically used Word only to read documents sent to me by others in the company, and cut-and-pasted them into the text editor to convert them to HTML. Not conducive to learning the bells and whistles, or the bugs and annoyances either.

Well, in the month since I started my new job as a technical writer, I've learned more about Word's bugs and annoyances -- at least on the Windows platform -- than I ever wanted to know. (I've even learned some of the bells and whistles, but the bugs seem to have the lead.) I've found at least three ways to insert a graphic into a Word doc, each with its own quirks. I've wrestled with style sheets that inexplicably contain instructions not to AutoSpace between numbers and Asian characters -- instructions that I can't find a way to exorcise. I've had a partially edited document that I saved out to hard disk open the next day sans edits and with no trace of an edited version on my drive. And I've lost track of the number of times I've gotten this little popup message that blithely informs me "Microsoft Word for Windows has encountered a problem and needs to close," and then apologizes for any inconvenience it may have caused me.

What I wouldn't give for a good, stable copy of WordPerfect right now.