Word vs. LaTeX

Writing longer scientific documents requires more from the text processing software than common writing tasks. For us scientists its worth thinking about which piece of software will give us the best results in the least amount of time. Speed usually comes with routine, in most cases that would be Microsoft Word. But in some cases it might actually save us time and produce better text documents if we use LaTeX, even if you still have to learn. The table below may help you to make a decision which piece of software is most appropriate for your task at hand.

Conclusions
Bottom line: If you need to write a short letter, a cover page, or a report to the administration, who thinks LaTeX is something kinky, you are best of writing in Word. For simple documents, you don't need fancy layout. So, you can save time by writing with a WYSIWYG editor like Word.

If you are writing a long document like a master/PhD thesis, an article, or a review, you are better of with LaTeX. If you have never used it before, you will have to invest some time before you can get cracking on the actual task. But with Word the you will probably need a similar amount of time at the end to get the formatting right, move figures, and iron out layout glitches. So, LaTeX on big documents will be slower at the start and faster at the end, probably overtaking Word during the last rounds since the automatic figure positioning routines, automated numbering, indexing, TOC generation will save you plenty of work. Here, it's advisable to use a template and adapt it.

Links
on OpenWetWare:
 * LaTeX
 * LaTeX OWW wiki extension
 * LaTeX template for PhD thesis

in Wikipedia:
 * Word
 * LaTeX
 * Comparison of word processors

other comparisons:
 * layout differences
 * 4 page review by Andy Roberts
 * intro to LaTeX by Scott McPeak from UCB
 * comparison of LaTeX text processing, Uni Cambridge