Comment Still not enough features in Google Docs (Score 2) 346
While most users most of the time don't need the extra features of Word, some users need them much of the time, and I expect many serious users would benefit from learning about them and using them on occasion.
In my own discipline (analytic philosophy), it is very common to have numbered propositions in articles, which are then referred to by number. The right way to do this in Word is to set up an automatically numbered list that allows for the list items to be noncontiguous but still numbered sequentially, and then to refer to the numbered propositions via the cross-referencing feature. This way, as you insert more numbered propositions while editing, the numbers and references get automatically updated. As far as I can see, Google Docs supports neither noncontiguous lists nor cross-referencing. That said, it is my feeling that while most people in my discipline use Word (a few use LaTeX, and I use it myself for symbol-heavy articles), most don't know about these features and just number and cross-reference manually.
For non-fiction writing where one needs to refer to other chapters, sections or footnotes (e.g., "See footnote 17, above" or "As we shall see in Section 4.3.1.a"), cross-referencing is pretty much essential if one wants to avoid error prone manual references, fixing which up can be nasty if the editor calls for revisions. Again, that's a reason to use LaTeX, but there is no need for LaTeX given that Word's alt-I,N does this quite well.
Assigning keys to special symbols is also very useful--sometimes I don't want to bother with LaTeX for something that just has some symbols from the Symbol font, but I certainly don't to be pressing alt-I,S and using the mouse to select the symbol (or alt-I,S,Tab,arrows,enter) each time, and a keyboard shortcut is just what the doctor ordered.
And while most of the time, macros aren't needed, there are times when they greatly reduce labor. For instance, recently I indexed one of my books. To do that, I used a perl script that uses in-text ASCII codes marking index entries and page breaks on the Word file back-generated from the galley PDF (the press refused to give me a copy of their Quark or InDesign file). But I had to insert all those ASCII codes to mark areas of text to reference, e.g., {{IndexEntryA:}}Text to which the index entry should point{{:IndexEntryA}}. Typing in the codes would be error prone. So I wrote some super-simple macros which greatly reduced labor. It still was a ton of work, but without macros it would have been very hard. How often do I index? Only once every couple of years when I have a book coming out. But when I do, I need all the help I can get from the software.
And there are little conveniences of macros. I was once writing something that didn't have much in the way of symbols, but kept on having italic variable letters with numerical subscripts in the text. I could have switched to LaTeX, but I liked writing in Word and that was about the only bit of technical symbolism I routinely needed. Without macros, a typical such sequence (T subscript 1, say) would be: ctrl-I, T, ctrl-I, ctrl-=, 1, ctrl-=. Easy to slip up, and a nuisance. With macros, I could just type T1, alt-S, and it would format it correctly. (A more sophisticated macro would check whether the subscript was numerical or a variable letter and italicize the latter but not the former. I can't remember if I had it do that.) The macro made it possible to more fluently, without the annoyance of slowing down to format subscripted variables whenever they occurred.
Whenever one is doing anything repetitively, a macro will help. I suppose for simpler cases when it's just a keyboard shortcut, one could use Google Docs and a keyboard macro program on one's desktop. But sometimes the macros need to aware of what's in the word processor text.