EDITOR - About to Pull My Hair Out

First, before I vent my frustrations, I would like to thank Auctiva for their great service. I really do appreciate them! Now on to my problems (sorry about that).
I am listing some items that should sell in the $100 - $300 range so I feel more time is justified in compiling an ad. I will be using some different fonts, sizes, a little color, some bullets, etc. However I am spending about 5 times the effort that should be required to format my ads. And yes, I am using profiles.
Editor often refuses to change type styles and colors. Sometimes, it will not even insert a space between lines no matter how many times I hit “enter” after a line. I am using the “full sized” editor for input. While I have forgotten most of my HTML codes, I usually can figure out some simple commands. But when I switch to HTML in Editor, I see the most bloated and confusing mess I have ever seen. As a suggestion to Auctiva, highlighting the actual text would at least help to locate the area you’re trying to find.
Okay I think, I’ll do a workaround by entering everything in Word, designating the type fonts and approximate point size. Copy & past that in Editor. Don’t I wish! As expected, Editor shows some variance in font sizes but doesn’t even keep the formatting. It ads spaces where there were none, and on & on. Okay I think, I’ll just highlight the text section by section and use Editors Formatting to get the font style as wanted. Again, just like entering into Editor from scratch it absolutely refuses to make some changes.
Hey, this isn’t going to get the best of me I think :-) I’ll copy the text into the Coffee Cup Editor, make certain that everything shows up correctly in the “Preview” mode and then cut & paste the HTML into Editor. Hummm! Should work but same results. I have also saved my changes in Editor, shut down the entire program & restarted to clear out cache in case that was the problem.
Here is where I stand now on an auction I am ready to post. In full text Editor, everything is exactly (finally after MUCH effort) the way I want. When checking in Format each & every line shows that is indeed the right Font & Point Size. I also clicked at the end of every line, deleted any “spaces” that might inadvertently have a change in formatting, etc. okay at last everything is perfect!
Go to Preview. What a mess. A bulleted list has on line in one point size, the next line an entirely different size. Spaces where there were none designated, no spaces where they were designated. Now keep in mind that in Text Mode everything is perfect.
Does anyone have a suggestion(s) that will help me out? I’m not about to learn coding. Coffee Cup is supposed to be a simple editor. However I think it is clumsy requiring multiple steps just to format simple Font & bullet text as an example. Anyone know of a real simple editor that has the ease of Word formatting and/or any other suggestions? I am really about to pull out my hair & I can’t afford to lose any more.
Thanks, Clickman
P.S. Failed to mention that some of the text for this auction was “cut & pasted” from another site into Word, then reformatted & saved before cutting & pasting into Word. That SHOULDN’T make a difference and the problems I have had with Editor in the past didn’t have that factor.