I have just un-installed the Office 2013 Preview, and installed the Office 2013 RTM 60-day trial.

I had hoped that between the two versions, the issue of missing true small caps in Word had been addressed. But no. Whilst Word 2013 supports OpenType ligatures and OpenType stylistic sets and OpenType old-style numbers and and and, it STILL DOES NOT SUPPORT TRUE SMALL CAPS. Yes, it has a small caps function, but this just reduces the size of the font, instead of using the dedicated small caps letters included in a lot of OpenType fonts. What's the difference? The difference is that with true small caps, the stroke width of upper case, lower case and small caps letters match, whereas in the cheapy, flimsy, yucky version that Office only offers, the small caps letters are thinner than the normal letters of that font - obviously so, as they are merely shrunken.

Try it for yourself. Type something like "AaMmXx" in an OpenType font with small caps, say, Calibri or Gabriola, at, say, 24pt, in Word 2013 and in Publisher 2013, and apply small caps in each, and print them. Compare the stroke widths. See what I mean? Publisher does true small caps. Word doesn't.

So, why, Microsoft, why, oh why, oh why, when other typographical features (ligatures, stylistic sets, etc. etc. & so 4th) are supported in Word 2013, are small caps not? I just don't understand it. Why? Are small caps held to be something that only professional typesetters should be allowed to use with typesetting programs like Publisher, whereas ordinary folk with Word shouldn't? Or is it trick to boost sales of Puiblisher? Or did no-one think about it? What is it? Because it's very annoying!

Well, to be honest, I don't really mind THAT much. You can still use them, it's just that you'll have to insert the characters as symbols one by one. I do it with PowerPoint and it works fine. As it's not advisable to use them much, just for headings and titles, I don't really care. However it would be better if Microsoft starts to support it in all office's programs, so I can stop adding the ligatures and small caps manually in PowerPoint...

Well, in the second place, inserting characters via Insert Symbol is a pain in the posterior, and, of course, the spell checker doesn't recognise them. But in the first place, that only works if the font author has been thoughtful enough to give the small caps glyphs Unicode code points, say, in the Private Use Area (like in Calluna). Normally, however, they don't - the small caps glyphs are only accessible via a small caps function, as lacking in Word. Excel is worse - apparently, Microsoft think that OpenType advanced features ought not to be used in spreadsheets.

So having found fonts with small caps, the only way to use them is to use a font program either to assign the small caps glyphs to PUA code points, or to put them in a separate font (which at least means that other applications and spell checkers can use them).

I note with great disappointment that even the very latest new version of Word cannot do true small caps.

I also note that no-one at Microsoft can explain why - or can be bothered to try.