Erik L. Arneson has a useful post that describes his method of converting an Org document to DOCX. His reason for doing that is the usual: his clients want a Word document but like all right thinking people, Arneson prefers to write in Org. His workflow lets him have both: a sane document preparation environment and an output that meets his clients’ needs.
Those of you familiar with exporting Org documents know that there are two ways of doing this. One is export directly to DOCX and the other is to use Pandoc. Most observers feel that Pandoc does a better job with DOCX so that’s what Arneson uses.
The post describes how to set up a template for the conversion so that you get a nice looking Word document. His workflow is complicated by the need to deal with several templates depending on the client and project. Because of that, he runs Pandoc from the command line but, as he admits, it’s possible to use ox-pandoc to automate all that by providing a bit of header matter in the Org document.
Having to provide a Word document is terrible, of course, but it’s depressingly common so Arneson’s how to is welcome. His post notes two negatives. First, he usually has to tweak the final Word document in LibreOffice to get it to look just right. Secondly, and much more depressing, is that many clients are now asking for a Google Docs document. That’s depressing because there’s no good Org to Google Docs pipeline but more importantly because no sane person or organization should be using Google Docs. Irreal has discussed this last point so many times that most of you are probably tired of reading about it. Still …
Regardless, if you have to produce Word documents but prefer a sane editing environment, take a look at Arneson’s post.