Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8½ by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called “Draft” that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to “Print Layout”—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to “know” what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.
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It’s not even Word’s fault, really, that these problems happen. Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don’t work that way anymore. Microsoft has added a metric ton of collaboration features to Word over the years to try and adapt to this reality, from Track Changes to Sharepoint integration. I’ve used almost all of them, and not only are they somewhat clunky, but getting other people to use them is like pushing a rock uphill. There has to be a better way.
For Reimer, setting up a company-wide wiki server solved his problems with Word. Most people aren’t going that far, opting for services like Google Docs, which is fundamentally a word processor, just like Word.