Tim Bray applies Emacs to a Word/Open Office problem:

But I was not defeated, no sirree. I switched back to Emacs and dropped into XHTML mode and pulled together a simple, minimal table; with a bit of judicious CSS margin and border wrangling I had a darn fine-looking resumé. It looked way better on the screen than either the Word or the OO.o version, and both Safari and Camino (which is now wrapped around the Firefox 1.5 code, BTW) produced excellent-looking print versions, Camino’s a little better.

So, I understand why we still need spreadsheets and presentation packages, but assuming you had a Web editor with a good change tracker, why would anyone want a word processor any more?

As bad as Word and Open Office (and WordPerfect) are, Emacs in XHTML mode is not the answer for most people. Oddly enough, Word didn't always suck. Word for Windows 2.0 was fairly decent - it went downhill from there, as MS started adding "help" and "smarts" to it.