🚀 go-pugleaf

incidentally, in order not to devalue the word I would prefer reserving "bug" for programming errors that cause the application to malfunction; to label functional deficiency or merely cumbersome solutions as "bugs" seems to be a linguistic short-cut that can only lead to misunderstanding   

A good point. 

Having not worked professionally with Word exclusively for many years, and having not ever called Microsoft and actually reported a bug with them, I don't know how much of my complaints are about "bugs" or some other category.  I do recall one specific incident involving Word 2000 in which an engineer was writing a spec document and had a table in the document.  A cell in the table simply refused to print correctly; it had text in it, clearly visible on screen and exactly the same as all other text.  But when the table was printed, the cell printed as blank.  Empty.  Nada.  I worked for an hour trying to figure it out, including completely recreating the table from scratch, without any success.  It never printed; he ended up using a bulleted list instead. 

This phenomenon becomes especially apparent when several authors are involved or when the document(s) need to be moved to other systems.   

This is absolutely correct.  I recently had the "privilege" to work with a cross-functional team on a requirements document.  The document was created in Word 2000, and probably had at least 30, maybe 40 different people work on the file, including cutting and pasting text from other sources. 

It was an absolute nightmare; as the document grew in size it became more and more unmanagable until I was literally screaming. 

I don't know if the things I was encountering were "bugs" or some other category (using Fredrik's terminology).  Frankly, I don't much care.  If this is what passes as "functional deficiency" at Microsoft, it is absurd.  Indeed, I would say that this is one of the key problems with talking about bugs in Word; it is often difficult to know what is a functional deficiency or not!  With Frame, you know what it is supposed to do; it is very explicit.  It is therefore easy to identify what is a "bug" because it is not behaving as expected.  With Word, it is hard to tell what is expected behavior and what is not.