I've set up wysiwyg editing on more than a dozen Drupal 7 sites. I can assure you that it works as advertised when it is set up correctly.
Since it doesn't fully work at your site (only in the Editor Appearence panel), one of the possible grounds for the problem may be that you've not set it up correctly.
You can start from scratch, using my tutorial for setting up CKEditor. I know it works, since my students use it in class and they all manage to get CKEditor installed, secured and working, without further prompting or assistance.
If you don't want to start from scratch, but prefer to debug your present installation, here are some of the things you that you should check:
First, navigate to your text formats: Administration » Configuration » Content authoring » Text formats and ensure the roles are configured correctly.
- Add roles you want to use wysiwyg to Filtered HTML and Full HTML (unless you've created a new text format for wysywyg, as suggested in the tutorial linked to below).
Then, navigate to your ckeditor profiles: Home » Administration » Configuration » Content authoring » CKeditor
Go to the profiles, and verify that the text formats for the profile are set, and the editor appearance is set properly.
- Under Basic Setup, check the text formats that apply
- Under Editor Appearance, set default state to enabled, and show the toggle.
Then make sure that your content type is by default set to one of the text formats configured for wysywyg. Navigate to Administration » Structure » Content types, select your content and click manage fields and edit on the fields you're having problems with. Make sure that the preset text format for that text field is set to to one of the formats configured for wysywyg (e.g. Filtered HTML).
To make sure that Filtered HTML is selectable, you need to make sure that the setting for "Text processing" is set to Filtered text (not Plain text):
Make sure that when you create content, a text format that is set up to use use WYSYWYG (e.g. Filtered HTML) is selected. The screen dump below shows how the pull-down menu immediately below the text field for content should look like:
Also: Remember to clear the cache after you've changed any setting that has something to do with wysiwyg.
If none of these help, please add more detail to your question. You tell us very litte about how you've set this up, making it very hard to reproduce the problem since we don't have direct access to your system for debugging.
PS: For a secure use of WYSYWYG, I recommend using a custom text format filtered with the WYSIWYG Filter. How you do this is described in this tutorial. However, first get it working, then start tweaking to make it secure.