5 reasons why you should stop using Microsoft Word

Among the many apps you get as part of the Microsoft 365 subscription, Microsoft Word is designed to create and process different types of text documents. It offers an incredibly powerful set of simple features, such as setting specific fonts or text styles, as well as in-depth formatting capabilities, such as creating highly customizable SmartArt objects and tables.

Despite this industry dominance, many users are unhappy with what the app offers. Whether it’s the fact that a pasted table never looks right or the difficulty of moving images or graphics around in your document, there are many reasons why people think you shouldn’t use Microsoft Word.

The most obvious of these is Google Docs (which will soon get a sleek new icon), a cloud-based program that can run directly in your browser and save your files directly online. It offers many of the most commonly used features of Microsoft Word and is sufficient for most everyday uses.

Yet even though Google Docs now offers audio previews, it lacks many deeper features, such as the ability to record custom macros. If you want a complete Microsoft Office replacement, programs like LibreOffice are free and offer virtually everything Word does. If you don’t mind something that looks different, an open source note-taking app like Obsidian can offer even more versatility using community-created plugins, again at no cost.

When you insert a picture into Microsoft Word, it defaults to “Inline with Text” or simply “Inline.” This means that the image is treated like any other text character in the same line as other letters. This can cause unnatural spaces between lines, your paragraphs to break every time you type something, and much more. Fortunately, fixing this problem is often as simple as changing the image’s behavior from “Inline” to “Tight” or another option.

Another reason many think you shouldn’t use Word has to do with image anchoring. Word is a word processor first, unlike an image editing tool like Canva. This means that it treats your images in terms of text and anchors them with paragraphs, where they move with the text. This can be a nice feature if you want to make sure an image is displayed next to a specific paragraph, but can break things if you’re not sure what you’re doing. You can fix this by locking the image or docking it properly, but for many people it’s easier to switch to another app altogether.

This does not mean that any available model is bound to generate errors; If all you’re doing is replacing text in a template, you’ll probably be fine. However, editing existing elements or inserting content that doesn’t fit within the existing boundaries can, at best, cause small formatting issues and, at worst, completely break your document. Because templates often rely on invisible tables or tab spaces to ensure everything stays in place, additional elements can break these tables and cause misalignment.

For example, if you are using a template that has two sets of text at different ends of a page and you try to make the text longer, the spacing between the two sides may be disrupted. If you have multiple lines, this may cause them to become misaligned. Alternatively, if you try to insert a table, image, or other graphic element into a template, Word can often fail to interpret where it is located, causing your document to completely break down.

Additionally, table cells always follow the same formatting rules as one-word paragraphs. This is what leads to cases like the one experienced by Redditor, where troubleshooting a table becomes much more difficult than creating a new one from scratch.

You may encounter problems even when pasting an Excel table. For example, a table with many large columns will overflow off the page, and manually correcting column widths can also cause words to break or overflow. These are entirely fixable if you take the right steps, but once you start working with nested tables or with columns and rows of different sizes, they can become a nightmare to manage.

Microsoft officially ended support for older versions of Microsoft Office on October 14, 2025. This includes Office 2016 and Office 2019, which will no longer receive any updates. This applies to new features, but also security and maintenance updates, which can cause issues ranging from slow application to real security risks.

It is always possible to upgrade to a newer version of Office, but many find it much more cumbersome and difficult to use than what they are used to, which is reason enough to stop using Microsoft Word. We’ve already discussed many alternatives in a previous section, and some of them even give you a similar experience to those now outdated versions of Word, such as LibreOffice or OnlyOffice.