Suzanne S. Barnhill shared this with us in
microsoft.public.word.newusers:

AFAIK, you're the only user who's ever reported that it didn't work.

Yes well that's me and all my co-workers, that's a few tens of people.

So what now? Spam the Microsoft feedback page until they give me a
decent reply, which is when hell freezes over? Or learn to live with
this cretinous proprietary ad-hockery and reinstall from scratch
If reinstall is needed, we might as well change to OpenOffice
(http://www.openoffice.org) as this appears to be completely compatible
for our purposes. And it's free (as in speech).

*sigh* all software sucks, but some suck more than others...