Creating a high quality Microsoft Word template

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I created a nice design for a client in Illustrator for a letterhead. They want said design formatted as a word template.

Word is driving me absolutely bonkers. I try embedding the design as a watermark, and word compresses it as a shit quality JPEG for some reason and fades it to 50% opacity (except when you print). So I try to lay it out with individual images within the document but that's not ideal because the client would have to copy the whole layout for each page.

I also tried a full image locked behind the text, but then I cant type anything on top of it.

Then I tried a text box at 100% width and height, but I cant set a vertical margin or it scales the image vertically.

I don't know what else to do. It seems like every idea I have is thwarted by some ridiculous convoluted quirk in the software.

Does anyone have experience with this type of thing? Is there some more intuitive third party software that I can use to create templates that will work with Word?

Thanks in advance.

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