Agreed. I am a power user of Word. All of my formatting is painstakingly performed by applying styles rather than manually formatting things. Headings, subheadings, captions, etc. are all tagged as such. Everything appears in the table of contents, table of figures, etc as it should, and styles can all be updated in one easy sweep.

But if you have even one collaborator who goes in and hammers something by applying manual formatting, the whole thing can be ruined. Actual images can end up showing up along with its caption in the Table of Figures. Entries can go missing from tables. Lone paragraphs can randomly end up with a different style.

Word can successfully manage large, complex documents, but it requires discipline. (as does LaTeX)

> Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it.

I would submit that the same is true for LaTeX.

Maybe the advantage of LaTeX is that people who don't know what they're doing will be scared off by the interface.

You mean that it will be perceived as so difficult to use that people will ignore it in favor of anything else? Calling that an advantage is a rather unique perspective. General document creation is not exactly something only a few specialists need to do.

I was a little tongue in cheek with that comment, but there could be a filter effect where people who aren't prepared to do it properly run away screaming from TeX and its many shells to the loving embrace of Microsoft Word, where they then do a terrible job and give Word a bad reputation.

I've done plenty of work where the customer insists that the final deliverable be in Word format, because that's what they're comfortable with. You can do proper formatting in Word once you learn the tools, and it's not even all that hard, although it can be somewhat unforgiving of screwups. The one thing I wouldn't attempt is to convert a TeX document to Word. In theory that shouldn't be entirely possible, but in practice there are about a million ways it could blow up in your face.

There was a civilized time when universities hired typesetters to do this job properly.

There was also a time when we paid people to operate an elevator. Then we improved the technology enough to make it simple enough for everyone to do it themselves. It has many benefits, and have the user more control over what they got and when they could do things.

I don't know about you, but I really appreciate being able to instantly get the results of a calculation rather than having to submit it to be worked out by a human calculator.

> Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it. By that I mean understanding how to use styles for formatting, how to properly insert footnotes/figures/tables etc, and what the implications are if you don't.

And I've yet to find a guide which instructs on how to set it up properly, how to share styles across documents etc. Do you know of one?

20 years of writing HTML and CSS has spoiled me; many times I'm using Word and thinking "I could do this with one rule in CSS" (often some crazy positioning nonsense with images/tables). If only!

Personally I've never found a single guide that you could hand to someone, but if you're coming from a background of HTML and CSS then you should pick up formatting rules pretty quickly - they're essentially the same, but implemented via a GUI rather than explicitly specified selectors and tags. The key for me is to just pretend that none of the explicit styling options exist - so no use of Bold/Italic/Centered/Whatever buttons, and instead turn on the styles pane and apply all formatting from there.