Those who have been working with the Word layout Reporting feature might have heard of the Word add-in called Jet Express for Word. The essence of this add-in is that "... your fields appear in clear text and the search feature makes it quick to add the fields you need", as Jet puts it on their website.
As it's freely available (so at no cost) download it and be happy with it. However I find myself using both Jet Express for Word and the Word XML Mapping pane as the have both their pros and cons. Let me list what I think as pros and cons.
I guess it's clear there is no winner here. Hopefully either Jet or Microsoft provides us with some improvements here.