Just came across this quote from the excellent Microsoft Word MVP web site, highly recommended if you are a reasonably serious WORD user.
"By the end of this exercise, you will realise that Word's default settings are all designed for the knee-cap-level user, and that we have to spend a lot of time undoing them. {Begin Political Rant} I hereby give you permission to think unkindly of the Product Marketing Department, which took the world's finest word processor and ruined it in order to reinforce the misconceptions of people who should not be left unsupervised with a pencil!!! {end political rant}."