[X Newbies] Alternatives to Word/MS Office

[marina]

 >If you are having a problem figuring out how to do this, please let me
 >know which feature(s) you need assistance with.

Thanks Randy. I think my problem is that the automatic features I would
like to turn off are not part of the standard set, accessible from the
Tools (--> Autocorrect... -->) or Format (--> Autoformat... --> Options
button) menus.
Or if they are, they are described in such a way that I can't find them.

The main areas where I find Word doesn't let me decide to my (professional
:-) heart's satisfaction are basically two:

1. Footnotes: Word seems to get confused when several footnote references
are present in each page, and I often have to manually edit the text in
order to leave enough space for footnotes to be inserted at the bottom of
the right page. I haven't been able to understand if there is a limit to
the number of footnote references per page Word finds "acceptable". Word's
behaviour seems to me to be totally random, and vary from document to
document. Formatting errors on footnotes are particularly frequent with
documents imported from other word processors, or from different versions
of Word itself.

2. Style sheets (or Templates, as Word inappropriately calls them):

a) I often find bulleted and numbered lists styles all mixed up when I
re-open a document, with numbered lists appearing with the "bullet style"
and viceversa. Also, numbered lists often seem to "forget" the "restart
numbering" options I had chosen at the beginning of each numbered list in
the document. When copying and pasting (within Word itself) complex
documents containing multiple numbered lists, the "pasted" version treats
all lists as being part of just one big list, numbered sequentially without
restarting at the beginning of the chosen sections (I hope this doesn't
sound too confusing - I certainly find it confusing that Word treats every
new list as a "follow up" of a previously defined list, and does not seem
to allow disabling this default behaviour!)

b) I'd like to be able to "boldicise" or "emphasise" portions of text in
any pre-defined style, without having Word creating new inline styles for
every occurrence of these bold or italic (emphasised) sections. If you are
familiar with working with complex, user-defined style sheets in Word,
you'd know how annoying it is to have to scroll down through dozens of (not
really necessary) styles before finding the right one for the highlighted
section. Given how often Word forces me to update styles or numbering on
lists, this adds to an already "too high to be professionally acceptable"
productivity loss.
Cascading Style Sheets, which have been defined as a WWW standard with the
support of MS, allow me to define <b>text</b> and <em>text</em> anywhere I
like within a page, without affecting my base style sheet. I really don't
understand why this can't be done in MS's professional word processor.

It is, of course, perfectly possible that, even after many years as an
"advanced" user, I haven't been able to master Word to the best of its
abilities, and I would really appreciate to know if there were any
solutions to my problems.


Many thanks,

marina