[Old Pedant]

No, of course MS Word (or *ANY* good word processing program!) does not limit itself to the silly limited set of ASCII characters! Why would it *WANT* to?

Word processors *want* to use all those characters to make the final output look better.

So they use "smart quotes" and en-dashes and em-dashes and ellipses and much more

He said, “now is the time for all ‘good’ men to come to!”
And he said it—loudly—tongue-in-cheek.

See smart quotes *AND* smart apostrophes there? And the em-dash? (You might call it "long dash".)

If you are going to allow people to paste word processed text into your <textarea>s, or even into standard text fields, then you will need to store the text as UNICODE and *NOT* as ASCII. In MySQL, that means storing the data as UTF8, most likely.

You can specify that all fields in a table are Unicode by putting the charset at the end of CREATE TABLE, thus:

CREATE TABLE mytable (
    name varchar(100),
    address varchar(50),
    city varchar(20)
) ENGINE = InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET = utf8;

Or you can pick and choose which fields are unicode and which are not:

CREATE TABLE mixed (
    name varchar(100) CHARSET utf8,
    email varchar(50)
);

(Here, email will be the default character set of your current MySQL *installation*, likely CHARSET latin1, whereas name will be Unicode.)