Obviously everything that puts text on a screen puts a font in the user's face. But Word also presents you with styles, which make what you see changeable from

Obviously everything that puts text on a screen puts a font in the user's face. But Word also presents you with styles, which make what you see changeable from the whitespace on up. Not only can one paragraph look different than the next, one word in a paragraph can look different from the word following it. It's true that many document elements, such as tables, are easy to create in Word. This puts it over the edge into desktop publishing territory. In itself, that's not especially a bad thing, especially if your target is a printed file or a PDF. That still makes it a publishing tool, not especially a writing tool.