Microsoft Office is like a hardware store packed with everything from power drills to light bulbs—in other words, packed with everything from Word and Outlook to Publisher and OneNote—and Microsoft wants you to buy everything in the store even if you only need one or two tools. Go to Microsoft's online Office store, and the top of the page displays options for buying the whole suite in various combinations including the Office 365 subscription service, plus separate editions for home, business, and professional use. But scroll down the page, and you'll see tiny icons that let you buy the Office apps separately. Microsoft has always offered this option, but you need to look for it. Many Office users only need Word, so it makes sense to buy only Word, for a one-time $109.99.

If you don't count Web browsers, Word is the most-used app on the planet—and probably the most complex and full-featured as well—so we're posting this full-scale review of the latest version, Word 2013. I'll focus first on what's new in Word, and then on some long-standing features that are hard to find in recent versions—or hard to understand even after you find them.

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What's New and Different
Word for Windows has gone through 15 versions since its first Windows version in 1989, and recent versions tend to improve on existing features rather than adding new ones. Aside from interface changes, the biggest new feature in Word 2013 is its ability to import PDF files, and, unfortunately, Microsoft's implementation has some major flaws. Word does an impressive job of converting a PDF file into a Word document so that you can edit it in Word like any other Word document, but Word doesn't let you overwrite the original PDF with your edited version. If you want to save the edited version in PDF format, you have to export it to a PDF file with a different name from the original—and then, if you want to replace the original with the edited version, you have to delete the original and rename the revised version so that it has the same name as the original one.

I can see why Microsoft did this: it's almost inevitable that an imported and edited PDF will end up with different formatting and layout from the original PDF, simply because Word and other applications have different ways of laying out a page, and Microsoft didn't want you to lose the original PDF formatting when you merely edited a few sentences. But Microsoft should at least have given expert users an option to overwrite the existing PDF file. (Like Word, the open-source LibreOffice suite gives an error message when you try to overwrite an edited PDF, but Corel's WordPerfect Office has the advantage of letting you save over the existing file.)

One new feature reflects the fact that Word documents are likely to be read on screen as well as on paper. An Online Video tool in the Ribbon's Insert tab lets you place a "live" YouTube or other video in the middle of the document. Unlike the pictures in newspapers that Harry Potter reads, the videos won't be live on paper, but anyone who opens the document on screen will be able to click the video to play it. Another feature cleans up Word's display of comments, making it possible to place a comment within an existing comment, and collapse a whole block of comments to save screen space.

Other new features in Word 2013 mostly provide easier ways of doing things that you could do already. The best such feature are the new alignment guides—green horizontal and vertical lines that appear on the page as you move an image or chart around a document, so you can line it up exactly where you want to. I used to bang my head on the table while trying to figure out where Word was placing an image that I moved through a document, and sometimes needed to dig deep into the menu structure to find the layout option I wanted.

Another new feature that protects my desk and forehead from damage: the positioning options that now appear on an image's right-click menu—no more digging into a dialog box to set layout options that place an image in-line with text or with text flowing around or above it. The pen tools provide similar abilities for drawing borders on tables or table cells. Instead of diving into complex dialog boxes for setting table borders, I can now click on a Border Painter tool in the Ribbon and click on the border that I want to paint with a special color or line thickness.