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You've heard it before: "Microsoft Word contains hundreds of features most people never use. "
But then again, one day you might need one of them and just one single feature might recoup the complete cost of the Office System. Let's just suppose that you have written a 400 page document some years ago. This document went through several revisions (in DOC), has been typeset in QuarkXPress, and has afterwards undergone several more cycles of copy editing and proofreading in PDF format with the result feed back to Quark. Several months later, you did some more revisions based on the PDF documents. Everything was fine, the world was bright.
At some point however, you decide that your document has to undergo a major revision which will significantly increase the size of the document as well. You now face the problem that all these PDF-based changes (literally, hundreds of them) never made it back to the DOCs. Ok. No big problem: just export them from Quark to DOC and work on these documents instead. But hey ... where did your styles go? Where is your nice formatting? Why are there so many Quarkisms in your documents?
Ok. Two options: use the old DOCs or try to ignore all the Quarkisms. Quite frankly: the second options doesn't appeal too much if you've ever seen one of these exports.
Now, there's one of these features in Word which hardly anyone ever uses: "Compare and Merge documents." This amazing thing has allowed me to take all the formatting/styles from the original DOCs and merge them with the changed text which has been exported from Quark. Without taking all the Quarkisms along. Seriously, this is like merging changes you made in the IL code back into your original C# sources. I'm totally blown away.
If you know the person on the Office team who's been resposible for implementing this feature, could you please tell him/her that I owe dinner the next time I visit Redmond?
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