After writing my general exam in MS-Word,  I swore off it unless forced to use it (i.e. collaborative requirements).  When a stupid but ambitious application program thinks it's smarter than you are and tries to 'correct' your writing (I now call it 'autocorrupt'), it's time to change.  These days I write in EMACS and format with LaTeX, printing in PDF.  I can't imagine writing my dissertation with the turd called Word.

Unfortunately, I have to keep MS-Worst on the family computer, because the public schools require parents to purchase for-profit software to support our children's education.  (There are too many incompatibilities with Open Office et al. that trip up my less-computer-savvy family members for the open-source tools to be a useful alternative in an compulsory MS world.)  Fortunately, I get it for free through *my* school.  

For programming, I used to use exclusively vi, but tried EMACS out of curiosity and found its UI to be a less constrained than vi's modal approach.  I use Gnu, FWIW.  -- Ian