Your question is about the technical aspect of production, which is not usually the concern of the writer. MS Word is a pretty standard format for preparing basic text. I actually prefer to use WordPerfect for composing my own articles, although I usually have to convert it to MS Word prior to submission. There are sometimes conversion issues with special characters, like quotation marks and em-dashes, but this seems to be more of an problem with Windows versus Apple than the specific word processing program.

Stephen said
I write a lot on my job and after a long session with Word I long for the days of foolscap and quill pens. 

  

It took me a long time to learn to compose online, but I have mostly been able to do that. On the other hand, I still print my drafts, and mark them by hand and then apply the corrections online later. I dearly wish that a PC was something that existed in my college days. So much time was wasted typing, correcting and retyping papers. My paper drafts often ended up as quite a jumble of pages and appended slips.