In what has to be the silliest question of the week, Kiiwyy, over at the Emacs subreddit, asks do you use Emacs as a substitute for Word. In particular, he’s wondering if people use Emacs for class or project notes. He says he uses Word for these and wonders what other people are doing.
In the first place, the concept of using Emacs as a replacement for Word seems backwards to me. Emacs can do so much more than Word that the question makes more sense the other way around.
The only real strength of Word is that all the normals use it so it’s sometimes necessary to produce a Word document for collaboration. The canonical example, and virtually the only one mentioned in the comments, is resumes. The other required Word use is in some publishing domains. A number of Journals, particularly in the humanities, insist that papers be submitted as Word documents. Similarly some book publishers really want Word documents—although they tend to be a bit more flexible—because it facilitates their production flow.
The commenters are, almost to a person, unsympathetic. They all note that—other than resumes—there really is no reason to use Word. Even if the final recipient requires a Word doc, you can always export an Org document to Docx so even for resumes you can maintain it in Org and export it to Word, PDF, or HTML as circumstances demand.
Sure, if you’re a secretary writing business letters for your boss, use Word. In most other situations, it’s hard to see why you would. Emacs has so much more to offer and, really, is just as easy to learn so why use word and worry about losing your document when Microsoft has a hiccup?