Word does not have a "Make it Fit" feature, but it does have a shrink-to-fit feature. You do have to shrink it one page at a time. You start with 13 pages and shrink it to 12, then shrink 12 to 11, etc.
However, the feature has been removed from the default Ribbon UI -- probably because only lawyers were using it. (College students tend to want to expand their documents rather than shrink them.)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2664217
WordPerfect has clung to a niche in law offices because lawyers are inherently conservative. Even then, Word still has a majority share in law offices.
Why? You can type LaTeX into the Word equation editor -- a fact that is little-known in the math community.
The main problem with Word for mathematics is that you cannot automatically number equations! What good is it to type equations if you can't refer to "Equation 7" and have the reference update when a new equation is inserted? That makes it useless for math, physics, theoretical computer science, etc.
On my particular version of Word I'll have to insert a "Caption" using the fscking-stupid-ribbon UI once and create a new counter "Equation" first, else you'll not be able to select a "Equation" in other parts of the dreaded UI.
Unfortunately, while the Eq. editor might understand LaTeX perfectly, nevertheless it will randomly thrash the font size and type whenever my colleague opens/edits/saves the document (at least the "new" font editor, the older "embedded OLE object" editor was broken in different ways).
And yes, I loathe Word and it's bastard cousins from the MS-Office-Suite with a passion and sometimes raging hate. Unfortunately there are things that money-earning demands to be made in those applications :-(
He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.
In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."
Some examples:
∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily
∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery
∙ Engineering research
∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)
∙ Law
Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.
The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.