I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type using rolls of paper instead of sheets so he didn't have to stop is his process. He "got it".
As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to write a complicated markdown table.
As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to write a complicated markdown table.