Amen to what tombert is saying there. LaTeX documents just look "nice" right off the bat and they do formulas perfectly. I would personally say that it totally

Amen to what tombert is saying there. LaTeX documents just look "nice" right off the bat and they do formulas perfectly. I would personally say that it totally depends on what you're trying to do. Most of what corporate types need is done fine with MS Word and like others have said, there's always that "expert" that can get you out of tight spaces. It works well enough for the general public so to speak. You want something scientific to look the part and not have any of the formatting hassles we all know from Word? Go use LaTex! I wrote both my Bachelor's and Master's thesis in LaTex. Yes, pure TeX is way outdated and even with LaTex you have to look at what the "current" packages are to use for various things (this was 15+ years ago and I have totally never had a reason to use LaTeX again, so I'm not current). Fun anecdote (at least to me): I did my Master's thesis at a company, so sort of outside of the "scientific environment" where LaTeX would've totally been accepted. The company wanted my thesis as a Word document. I refused. I said I'd give them a Word version as an export afterwards but without any changes to the formatting, no niceties, nothing. Just a plain export, that's it. I was not gonna go through the formatting and editing hell of Word for a thesis, ever! Unlikely hero: my direct 'boss' at the company, who was overseeing the thesis work had written his own thesis like 10 or more years before that in LaTex and he defended me against his boss. Next day he comes to me and proudly tells me he went and grabbed his own Master's thesis from backup, downloaded a current LaTeX and ran it through. Looked as beautiful as ever!