Monique,
How interesting, I never got round to checking out the exported file. Like you I couldn’t get it to show in the preview pane when I used the TEXT filter, only when I used the Overlay HTML filter, so I just assumed it wouldn’t show on the exported video.
The Overlay HTML filter is useful to produce things like animated titles, screen credits and subtitles. Basically you put the HTML into a file (e.g. “title.html”) and pass this to the Overlay HTML filter in Shotcut. HTML and CSS are a great way of quickly producing semi-professional animation effects.
There are several posts on this forum showing how to get these effects and I have put together a framework to help users to get the most out of this filter and put it up, with examples, on my website at Shotcut - Elusien's Contributions. See the following:
By the way, I too am using Shotcut on a Surface Pro and do not see any problems with it.
P.S. If you want to process word docs before you get to your disks in the USA try LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/). I use it all the time as I don’t have MS Office on any of my Windows systems.
Best wishes in using Shotcut.