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This article has a very misleading title. "Microsoft's document formats and Word application are the bane of word processing" would be more accurate.

Hubert Cumberdale hit the nail on the head: The MS Word application cannot reliably round-trip a document with itself without causing formatting issues. That this still happens between machines when the version numbers of MS Word and Windows are identical and are both fully updated is as ridiculous as it is damning. You cannot get more closely matching versions of both OS and application than the mandatory upgrades that come with Windows 10 and Microsoft 365, especially when both are using the same licence!

It is not like this is even a recent problem. I first used MS Office sometime back in the early-mid 90s and these round-trip formatting bugs were present even back then. The fact that decades worth of updates did absolutely nothing to stop this from happening is quite revealing. After all, why would Microsoft change what sustains their lucrative office monopoly?

Microsoft have always used these formatting problems to their great advantage over the years, creating a wave of fear, uncertainty and doubt to scare people into using and routinely upgrading their inferior and more expensive products. On the one hand, other vendors' platforms and application products are always blamed for the messed up formatting issues, and on the other hand scare tactics warn that anyone who dares not to use MS Office will suffer much embarrassment, the loss of their professional reputations and business will suffer as others would simply refuse to do business with anyone who uses anything other than .doc/.docx! The 'our employees would down tools with any other office suite etc. etc.' bullshit that shills tend to wheel out whenever it comes up may work as a Microsoft sales and marketing scare tactic to influence the technically illiterate, but why it gets repeated on tech sites is a total mystery.