Rafi Haladjian proposes an interesting way to read word documents from a meta point of view in his book Devenez beau, riche et intelligent avec word, excel et ppt (in french) : - if the author has not used a stylesheet (for instance all the document is Normal and the authors put bold and italic stuff by hand), that means that he or she has a large amount of time to loose (avoiding having a stylesheet is indeed very time consuming). - with the statistic tool, you can see how long did it take to write the document...

He proposes to use those two tools to evaluate the price and the usefulness of the word documents sold by expensive consultants. He also explains that now, pdf documents are a way to hide this kind of information.