I have just finished my PhD thesis in LATEX.

I have to say that I was undecided at the begging because I could handle word very well but on the other hand I had never used LATEX before.

At the end I can say that I am very happy with my decision and if I had the chance I would prefer again LATEX 100%.

I forget about alignments, equations, table of contents, table of figures, bibliography e.t.c. Final I think the quality of the document is amazing with the LATEX.

I think yes, it is. LaTeX provides you more comfortable writing. For example with spaces between word, unit and so on. Automaticaly flushed to best resolution on paper. A article looks like more profesionally in Latex than Word. It is my opinion.

Thanks Tomas for giving short explanation.

Welcome. In my topic - Technical is the LaTeX number one apps. The Word has many bugs with text, centering, linking and so on.

I would say "t depends on the context". Word can work well for many kinds of text/table writing. If your writing involves a lot of formulas, special characters or formatting then LaTeX may be a better option. Some journals will reformat your text no matter what the input.

It is good view, Carl. I am studying education psychology and developing instrument using some statistical analysis. Do you think which one is more convenient for me? Sometimes Word can be tedious, but I don`t know about Latex. For example, given that writing thesis with Word takes really time, especially formatting, including writing article as well, do you think all these difficulties experienced with Word will be recovered by the LaTex? :)

I have just finished my PhD thesis in LATEX.

I have to say that I was undecided at the begging because I could handle word very well but on the other hand I had never used LATEX before.

At the end I can say that I am very happy with my decision and if I had the chance I would prefer again LATEX 100%.

I forget about alignments, equations, table of contents, table of figures, bibliography e.t.c. Final I think the quality of the document is amazing with the LATEX.

Thanks Alexander and George for sharing your ideas as well, I will at least try to use LaTex by writing article to see whether I can or not :) I downloaded Miktex/Texmaker recently. It would be great if you suggest me any basic tutorials and more.

I am also just getting started using LaTeX and I found this introduction useful:

http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/mirrors/CTAN/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf

and for looking things up, the WikiBook is a nice resource:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/

However, I also wanted to add that Word is very convenient to use while the manuscript is in the process of being written, e.g. for sharing it with colleagues who can then easily use track changes or make comments.

For Psychology, in my opinion, LaTeX is not necessary, but many journals provide a LaTeX template for manuscripts, so you do not have to read through all the author guidelines over and over again.

Thanks Aenne for giving useful information.. But I believe using LaTex will help me to write articles more efficiently rather than using Word.

There's no doubt about what is easier at first. While for a simple "Hello world" in Word you just write those two words and are done and small changes like bold, font size, and centred are simple too, for LaTeX you have to master a whole lot of overhead first. So although already having a rough knowledge of what TeX is and how it's used, I too tried Word first. Personally I found it totally unuseable. I spent so much time swearing at it, I became hoarse and didn't get any work done. So I bit the bullet and learnt LaTeX. After the first couple of days things began to run so smoothly and easily and all that niggly stuff taking up hours in Word to optimize comes out perfect automatically, that I'd never even consider changing now.

On top of everything that has already been mentioned here. I would like to add that with Latex, you could keep everything in your source code by commenting/uncommenting text to switch back and forth between different versions of say a paragraph.

It takes a while to learn all the ins and outs of LaTeX, but I still think it's well worth learning and using it. In addition to being able to control floats (i.e., table and figures) with more ease and transparency than Word, LaTeX also makes it much faster and easier to transfer between different formats. For instance, switching between Elsevier, IEEE, and APA style formats is very easy in LaTeX: just swap out the (.cls) style sheet and all the formatting is done for you. It is also great to be able to create vector figures inside of LaTeX (using TIKZ and PGFPLOTS), although this is admittedly more advanced.

Thanks Axel, Amir and Jeffrey for your kind contribution. For me doing research on personality, mostly journals is required only Word, is it anyway to convert to LaTEX to WORD? Also how can I master LaTEX in short time, any suggestions to learn on my own?

If that's what's required, you have no choice. When they say "Word" what they mean is unformatted typewriter lookalike with no figures, no captions and no footnotes or rather all in separate appendices. This is pure text and your best bet and most ergonomic tool is a good editor. Just to please the boss and for no benefit at all you can load the finished txt into a word processor and save it as doc. Anything more is just pearls before pigs.

First of all, if the juornal you want to submit your paper requires Word well, stick with it. Or better, use Libre/Open Office which are much more crash-proof than Word, saving your work in docx format.

However, in the long run, this choice will prevent you to appreciate several useful characteristics of LaTeX that ease the task of writing, allowing you to focus on content instead than on layout. Bibliographies, footnotes, cross-citations, images, layout changes, master documents, versioning, all this can be handled much more easily in LaTeX than in Word.

Making Word work for you depends on learning how to customize it and using hidden tricks and techniques. These include...

1) Mastering making tables (I can make and edit a table quickly in Word, but still haven't mastered it in Latex...of course, I haven't spent as much time practicing).

2) Learn keyboard shortcuts for everything you do.

3) Learn how to link and embed tables and pictures (and the differences between the two) for reproducible research

4) Use tracked changes and comments. 

5) Use hidden text for things you want to keep in the document but don't want collaborators to see or don't want to show when printed. 

6) Also, just FYI, Word's equation editor has improved a lot. It now recognizes Latex equation formats (e.g., y_i for y-sub-i). Although it only does one-way translation, so detailed editing of equations may still be easier in Latex for you. 

7) Learn about linking within document, sectioning, creating TOCs, page numbers, etc. 

8) Find a good reference manager. One colleague uses the newer built-in manager that Word has. I like Mendeley and Zotero. 

I'm probably forgetting a few helpful tips, but the point is that you really need to know how to use Word, just like you really need to know how to use Latex to make it work and support your research instead of being a distraction. It comes down to what your collaborators use (or you have to build in workflow steps to go between Latex and Word), the kinds of documents you work on, and your preferred editing environment (super-GUI v. code). Since I already knew Word really well when I started grad school, most of my collaborators use Word, and I don't do a lot of equations in my work, I haven't had a good reason to spend time switching (and I've tried a few times). I also really like being able to see my formatting right away, instead of having to compile it first. For some people, that leads to a distraction of tweaking formatting when they should be writing, but I've learned how to not do that. You can still separate writing form formatting in your process without going to Latex. For very large documents and complex equations, Latex is probably better (from what I hear). 

It is nice explanation, although I am interested to new type of way and easy to manage rather than office word, but still use with office word anyway. I also tried a bit with Latex, sounds difficult for me to learn on it. 

Matt Jans thank you for the detailed post.

It has built my confidence that I am not wrong in using MSword for research publications. I have known MSword very well and find it hard to switch and spend time on Latex.

I do not have to deal with much equations also. Infact MathType (addin) allows to convert from eqn. in MSWord to Latex format  and vice-versa. So maybe I can switch to latex (if required!). 

All your points (1) to (8)  are so right.. especially "the point is that you really need to know how to use Word, just like you really need to know how to use Latex to make it work and support your research instead of being a distraction."

In a world full of chaos people some times like to taste some discipline. for example they write pm for personal message or ad for ... and os for ... and so many others.

but they like to write latex as LaTeX (they are very committed to write capital letters L T and X) and read it like latech or laytech not latex (the rubber material maybe to avoid you to think to flexibility)!

it seems that except the beautiful appearance of final text they enjoy to obey some new rules. I am always surprised why engineers put this time to compile a text but dont like to use C++ to simulate an engineering problem; they simply learn Matlab because it is easier!

It is a month I found a software to help computer to be the device to do things faster (in regard to Latex): LYX is a GUI for latex. it is like office and very easy to use and also very stable. 

You can also check online tools fo LaTeX such as Overlaf (www.overleaf.com), ShareLaTeX (www.sharelatex.com) and Authorea (www.authorea.com).

They are a good compromise between ease of use and compliance to standard LaTeX (which is something which is not always true with LyX).

The above mentioned services are free to use, unless you have some special needs, can be used without installing anything on the computer, work on any machine and operating system provided you have a connection to the internet, and encourage collaborative work.

It is late but Thanks for your all comments. All of them accordingly appreciated. 

In fact, Latex is greatly dominant to be preferred in terms of comfortability and effectiveness, unfortunately I still continue to use Office Word, I don't have choice than this. If any simple tutorial on this-usage of latex-  I guess it might be useful to reevaluate this. 

@Mustafa: You can check this thread on RG: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_LaTex_is_better_choice_than_Microsoft_Word

Thanks Sabino for your giving one more hope to begin this learning with Latex.   Hope to start it, the thing is that I don't use equations- mostly in my field- writing review based relatively-psychology- there is only statistical parts that are copied from SPSS or AMOS only. In this case, if I learn Latex, I will mostly use to write reviews so does still make sense? I am not sure...

LaTeX is invaluable not only for insering equations and tables, but also for managing the bibliography or for cross-referencing different parts of your text, for table of contents, indexes. You will not believe how much time you save from all this until you try.

LaTeX is by far the most convenient tool for writing long documents, such as thesis: it enables a full control on what and how your are writing. Tables, pictures, maps will be located exactly where and how you want them to be. No errors while formatting references cited in the body text. I mean, if you added some publications in the Literature section that have already been cited previously - the citations will be updated automatically: it's great! It refers to any research field, including psychology, of course. As for template, do feel free to take an reuse my MSc Thesis .tex file from here:

Code LaTeX template for the MSc thesis

see this:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_LaTex_is_better_choice_than_Microsoft_Word