it's not that MS Word is portable. It's a tool imposed upon me from work. I find however that using clever CSS-HTML I can create tables that import directly into Word without the need of any special formatting, so I can do all my work in perl, and occasionally I put it into report format for these other bozos. :)

The key being that perl allows me to keep my data in data format, that is easily manipulatable, but not necessarily easy to visualize. If I had my way I'd make everyone use a commandline interface, but for some reason with modern guis, that is almost taboo--if you want to create a tool for the whole team.