dropdown menus and font in MS word office

hi all,
I always face a silly problems regarding navigation in Safari with voiceover which is dropdown menus. for Instance, when I try to select dates of a flight or anything similar the VO keeps saying clickable and I can't select dates, and so on.. can anybody navigate around that?
the second problem is using MS office word. whenever I type a document, I can't format it well and have to ask a sighted person to help me in that. can anyone tell me how to let voiceover read all the format information?
thanks