That spinning cursor means that Microsoft Word is busy (unlikely) or has hung (more likely). There's really nothing you can do besides killing it.
Note: direct your anger at Microsoft, not Apple, for shoddy programming here.
If you're lucky, the next time you open Word, it'll pull up an "auto recovery" of your file that Word periodically saved in the background. This is funny, actually, because it's basically Microsoft's way of saying, "yeah, we know our crappy software is probably going to hang or crash and cause lots of suffering in lost data; so, we'll try to make up for that by saving a backup every few minutes and acting like the good guys when it's restored."
Advice for future: when working on important documents
regardless of the application,
save frequently.