The built-in Equation Editor in Word used to be awful until about Word 2007-2010 when it started interpreting LaTeX-like keywords (it doesn't really support ful

The built-in Equation Editor in Word used to be awful until about Word 2007-2010 when it started interpreting LaTeX-like keywords (it doesn't really support full LaTeX, only a pseudo-LaTeX-like subset) and fixed some aesthetic issues. I would say the latest Equation Editor is pretty decent and suffices for most scientific papers. Even so, it does stumble on more complicated equations (the kind of equations that pure mathematicians write -- the symbol set in LaTeX is just much bigger, and being a typesetting language, it gives the user much more control over element positioning). Equation Editor also doesn't support more esoteric math objects like say Feynman diagrams, but in LaTeX there's usually a package for it. Also, aesthetically, Equation Editor output, though functional, looks a bit off compared to true typeset math. LaTeX-heads are sensitive to aesthetics that way. In my time, those who outgrew Equation Editor moved to third-party software like MathType, which is much closer to LaTeX in functionality. I'm not sure if people still do that.