I haven’t used the new Word enough to know whether I hate it as much as the old Word, but I can share a random fact I discovered today:
Y’know how everything typeset in Word looks like dogshit? That’s because it doesn’t do kerning by default (or decent justification, or any of those things that have made typography not shit for the last umpteen years, but that’s by the by). Anyway, the random fact is that it actually does support proper kerning, it just doesn’t enable it. If you open a new document, right click and select Font…, then choose the Character Spacing tab, and check “Kerning for Fonts”, setting it to something like 8 points and above, then click the “Default” button, all of your documents will magically look much, much better (assuming you’re using a font with proper kerning tables; the new Office fonts such as Calibri and Cambria have these).
That this isn’t enabled by default is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Stupider than Clippy, even.
Oh, and here’s how to massively improve the justification (by making it emulate a 12-year-old word processor).
This still won’t prevent Word being a complete pile of shit, but it will at least make your documents look a little bit less like they were typeset by a blindfolded toddler using fridge magnets and a sledgehammer.