I used to advocate for using Word styles where I worked. I didn't make many converts. I think one issue is that Word's built-in styles are just so weird. Blu

I used to advocate for using Word styles where I worked. I didn't make many converts. I think one issue is that Word's built-in styles are just so weird. Blue font on a white background for section headings? (if I remember correctly) Who ever asked for that? And yes, you can modify the default styles, but it's a nuisance, it's laborious, and if you ever forget to save one of your changes to your template, it won't show up the next time. (And the modified template can be hard to find next time.) But absolutely the worst thing about Word's styles is section numbering. Nearly every technical document I've ever written has used "legal" numbering (sections 1.1 and 1.2 are under section 1, for example, with 1.1.1, 1.1.2 etc. under 1.1). Word seems inherently incapable of doing this. I know there are web pages that tell how to force it, but (1) it's again quite laborious and error prone, and (2) it's just buggy, for instance if you do a copy-paste of a section to some other place in the document. LaTeX does all this out of the box, with no errors whatsoever. And it also does cross-references to sections correctly, which Word can do--but in my experience, not well. I could go on, but there are other reasons people tend not to use Word's styles.