Sometime before I retired from full time employment, I realised that once I finished I would no longer get the free upgrades of MS Office from Work that the license they had allowed us, so I downloaded Open Office and started to use that. Open Office will read and save to MSOffice *.doc format and I have found that it does so very well. Since retirement I have continued to work part time for the UK Open University and have used Open Office for my work with them, converting files to MSOffice format as needed and it worked absolutely fine. I don't have need of some of the obscure functions but I do use features such as comments in text documents.

Although Open Office does do things differently from MSOffice, it is sufficiently similar that you can learn to use it fairly quickly. It has the twin advantages of being free and providing versions for all the major operating systems.

In your situation, that is an alternative solution you could consider. It certainly would cost you nothing (apart from time) to give it a try.