Layout in Word 2007 sucks!

Layout of pictures, tables, drawing canvases, text boxes, spreadsheets, and equations is seriously broken in Word 2007. First, there's no universal way to layout non-text. For example, Drawing Canvases were a nice addition to Word 2007 but they are not very useful since you can't embed tables, spreadsheet, or equations. For tables, you can work around this by embedding the table in a text box, and then embedding the text box in the drawing canvas. However, for spreadsheets and equations, you're out of luck. Perhaps this is a problem when trying to embed any OLE document, although I would assume Microsoft could get this to work properly for their own office suite.

Far more annoying is the schizophrenic layout algorithm in Word 2007. I assume that behind the scenes it's trying to balance keeping paragraphs whole, avoiding orphaned section titles, anchoring, etc., but the outcome is often surprising and wrong. For example, I'll insert a graphic into a page and it will cause the previous page to now have a blank spot that takes up 90% of the page. Most surpising: the graphic could easily fit inside that blank spot!

Most of the time I want a block graph at the top or bottom of the page but Word seems to have a prediliction for inserting graphics inline (e.g., newspaper style) and moving the graphics with the text. To accomplish this Word appears to "anchor" images at the point of insertion. I wish there was a way to completely turn off the anchors (no, Lock Anchor and Top and Bottom Text Wrapping doesn't do this) and for Word to just flow text around the blocks.

I've been struggling with this issues for years. I wish I had learned LaTex!