Word

Microsoft Word is the word processor in the Microsoft 365 Office apps. It runs on Windows, macOS, the web, iOS, and Android, and shares the same .docx file format across all of them. Documents stored in OneDrive or SharePoint support real-time co-authoring, comments, and @-mentions that send notifications via Outlook. Word includes advanced features for long documents — styles, references, tables of contents, track changes, footnotes, mail merge — that keep it the default tool for legal, academic, and enterprise document work. Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates with Word for drafting, rewriting, and summarising.

Worked example

A law firm associate drafts a contract using Heading styles rather than manually bolding and resizing section titles — that's what lets "update table of contents" or a template restyle work in one click instead of a manual pass through every heading. Track Changes records each reviewing partner's edits as a coloured, attributed insertion or deletion, and Compare produces a redline between two versions even if track changes wasn't on the whole time. When three partners need to review the same draft, storing it in a SharePoint document library instead of emailing attachments lets all three co-author it live and see each other's cursors, rather than collecting three conflicting copies back over email.

Common pitfalls

Formatting by hand — manually bolding text that should be a Heading style — is the most common failure, and it quietly breaks automatic tables of contents, cross-references, and any later restyle. Emailing .docx attachments back and forth instead of sharing a OneDrive or SharePoint link produces the classic "final_v3_ACTUALLY_FINAL.docx" version chaos that co-authoring exists specifically to avoid. And assuming Track Changes was on throughout is risky: if a reviewer switches it off temporarily, those edits become invisible and unattributed, and Compare against an earlier saved copy is the only way to recover what actually changed.