If you don't have a need for full-color or high-volume printing, Word may work fine for all your needs. You may even want to explore ways to do even more design projects with it. However, if you expect to have your materials printed commercially be aware that while some printers will accept your Word files you can often expect to pay dearly for them to rework the files in order to achieve acceptable results.
Here are just a few reasons that Microsoft Word is not normally suitable for commercial printing.
- File Formats
Word .doc files are not widely accepted by service bureaus and printers. Although Word can create the more acceptable PostScript files the method is not intuitive. Many experienced designers have troubles with PostScript and it is not a format typical Word users know enough about to tackle effectively. - Graphic Formats
TIFF and EPS are the standard graphics formats for desktop publishing. However, most Word users who have no training in desktop publishing and prepress are likely to use other less print-suitable formats and Word sometimes has problems handling EPS graphics. - Color
Word cannot specify standard PMS colors (commonly used for spot colors). It cannot properly interpret the embedded color information in TIFF and EPS images so the colors you see on-screen are likely to not match what prints.
Microsoft Word is a good word processing program. It can be used for complex documents normally designed in a dedicated page layout program. Although there are services that will work with your Microsoft Word files, in most cases Word documents are most suited to desktop printing or photocopying, not for full-color or high-volume commercial printing.
