MSWord doesn't have formatting codes, at least not for simple text styles. Instead, each individual character has formatting attributes. So the word italics is not a single italicized region, it's 7 separately italicized characters, that just happen to be next to one another. It's a radically different model from HTML/markdown/WordPerfect markup.

Microsoft Word may never have problems inserting any formatting, but I have; when it comes to paragraph structure, indenting and such, I find it very hard to predict. For example, I'll look at sections of a document with basically the same structure, but in one place the spacing between a table and the paragraph that follows is much larger, and I have no idea why or how to make them the same.