1) MS Word is the worst program I have ever used for anything.

2) Despite what anyone tells you LaTeX is not actually very difficult to learn.

3) Since 95% of academic writing needs to be formatted as a manuscript and since different journals' preferred formats differ, LaTeX's separation of content and format makes complete sense. Need to resubmit, change the format package from Journal of A to Journal of B.

4) Very few journals actually provide LaTeX style files for their preferred formats and that is a crime.

5) Many journals explicitly require a MS Word .docx and not a .pdf (let alone a .dvi!)

6) 95% of academics use the most conveniently available software which is what:

a) they are used to

b) is pre-installed on their computer

c) they don't have to personally pay for

d) most other people use

7) Currently, that convenient standard is MS Word

8) It is very difficult for LaTeX users and MS Word users to collaborate.

a) For some odd reason, MS Word users have the logistical high-ground in the argument about which to use

So in the end, I use LaTeX for everything I can but I have to keep Word around.

Well, from my experience, neither MS Word or LibreOffice are good solutions when writing technical documents. The more you need to write equations or formulas, more inadequate they are. In this case Latex is the perfect solution, but you'll have to deal with Latex programming language. A good starting point, to deal with less code is to use Lyx, that is a good near WYSIWYG software.

The main issue here is that both, MS Word and Open/Libre Office, are not meant to typeset scientific documents. All the professional involved in the writing of scientific documents need to understand the difference between "word processing" and "typesetting" and why they are more suitable of different situations, i.e. if you need to write a paper you might prefer to use LaTex because, once you feel comfortable with it, because it offers better tools to manage references, equations and figures, and due to it also makes it possible to create high quality documents. If you need to write a technical manual/report or a technical procedure it would be easier and faster to use a word processing tool as MS Word (which I like the most).

I have worked my M.S. Thesis using LaTex and Winedt as the development environment. It was organized in chapters, added as input to a main .tex file. All the references were managed using Bibtex/Jabref. Almost all universities have LaTex templates for their Thesis. For the equations I have used Mathtype 6 with the option of copying the Latex2e code. For almost all figures I have used MATLAB, saving them in .eps format. For the flow chats I have used MS Visio, saving the files as .emf and then converting them into .eps without losing image quality. For the Tables, I have used an excel macro called Excel2Latex.

I do not consider myself as a LaTex expert, but I have managed to integrate several tools that were familiar to me in order to create nice and clean LaTex papers and my M.S. Thesis.

When I need to work under a MS Word template for a paper, I also use Mathtype 6 as the eq. editor, and I manage the references by myself because I dont like the reference manager included in MS Word (2007), in fact I think it has errors when dealing with the IEEE method. I also try to use .wmf and .emf Figures in order to mantain the quality of Figures.

It is indeed a pertinent question: why do we use word processor when we are writting a scientific paper?

Unfortunatelly, many times it is because the templates they give us are in MS-Word format, so we have no choice. At least in the engineering, optics, etc... field, I've found a quite large number of simposia, publications, etc... which request their contributions in Word format. So we must ask the editors of these publications, why do they actually ask for contributions in that format. MS-Word is almost an autoedition tool (it is not even that), and it makes no sense to me that professional editors ask the contributors to do their job, in a clumsy way, and then have to re-format everything.

OK, if you don't know how to typeset in LaTeX, you might feel lost with a TeX template, but in my experience, certain MS-Word templates are a real hell on earth... because they are obscure, they behave erratically and never do what you want them to do. LaTeX might not be as visual, but at least it works in a predictable way.

So, why do we use MS-Word? Just because it comes with the computer at the office, I guess. At the end, there is no really logical answer to it, just inertia.

Yes, I agree with you, MS-Word is not the better choice but MS-Word and EndNote or another bibliographic editor can be very useful to write scientific articles

I have just completed a dissertation which was very maths oriented with tables and graphs. I used Lyx, which is a fairly user-friendly typesetting option, which allows maths to be input easily and you can also import JPEG and other graphics.

There are many different document classes, so you can have Chapters, or sections and it creates a Table of Contents (or figures, or tables) automatically, and also has a useable bibliography to maintain all your referencing.

Other useful options are different lefthand and righthand margins if you want double sided printing.

I found it useful to prepare a number of shorter, varied documents, to find my way around the features, and I also used online help to sort out minor problems.

LATEX is, surely, the better way of doing that, but for most of us LibreOffice is the best choice because of its simplicity. At least on Brazil, were we have the best grammatical corrector working on LibreOffice and we have, also, some templates that works fine for scientific writing. On MS Word I had so many troubles that I never tried that again.

As a comment to Ricardo, I agree that MS-Word with Endnote are good. However, you should check out (almost) any latex editor with Papers2. It does the same thing with the benefit of latex...

It pretty much depends on what you're doing and for whom you're writing. If I write a manuscript or notes for myself (no formulas needed), I've started to use mark-down writers. You don't need most of the functions any office texteditor uses. With mark-down, you've got your basic formatting options and concentrate on writing, not editing, stylizing or anything else accept crafting a good text. Most of them can export to PDF/ HTML/ rft and you're good.

It has a closer-to-the-text feel and seperates the writing process from the formatting process.

The modular behaviour of Latex allows a person to expand its capabilities to any specific area. For example, in chemistry we have mhchem and chemmacros that, when added to Latex makes it perfect for chemistry and in agreement with all IUPAC standards. There are modular packages for almost any area, from music to advanced physics.

With MS Word you can do very interesting things: in old versions of MS Word was a good flight simulator integrated in the SW. The only impossible thing using MS Word is to write a decent scientific document! LibreOffice has similar problems, but at last it is free!

Latex is the only good choice!

I have not used LibreOffice much but instead I have been working with Open Office quite extensively. I have not noticed much differences between OO and MS Word. The only issue is when one write a paper and has to use EndNote. If you are a Mac user EndNote will not work with anything other than MS Word. In Windows environment, you can use Open Office with EndNote. I have not done so, but I checked that the EndNote toolbar shown up in OO. One other difference: newer MS Word (2007, 2010-Win and 2008, 2011 Mac) uses .docx extension. Open office will open documents saved as '.docx' but will not save them back in this format. One has to use legacy '.doc' format or '.odt' OO's native format. Files saved in '.odt' (OO's native format) can be saved with a password.

When it comes to full blown scientific writing (complex figures) I found that neither program does a good job. I am a biological scientist so we do not use formulas, but often use figures which are combination of raster (pixels) and vector (lines, letters, shapes) parts in one figure. For example, a gel (PAGE or Agarose) picture with all descriptions: lane numbers, MW marker sizes, etc. For this purpose I use InDesign. Once the figure is created it can be exported out and imported into OO or Word in its final form. I would not create figures in OO or Word. I have recently seen one of our grad students face problems: figures created in one version of MS Word (Win based) looked completely "out-of-whack" when opened on the Mac using the Mac counterpart of the win version in which the document was created.

I hope this helps. Please write back if you need any more information.

In the US many universities, presses, and journals require MSWord for all submissions. I agree that it has some major formatting challenges, but I produced my own dissertation and have edited many other dissertations and articles using MSWord as required by the universities or publishers. These did not, however, have mathematical formulas although they did include graphics, charts, and tables. The growing monopoly of MicroSoft may be a substantial influence in the US.

EndNote or a similar bibliographical tracking program seems essential to tracking and then being able to later access reference information. Developing a coding system in the Keynotes field and including notes, abstracts, and quotes from materials all helped greatly in writing my dissertation and in accurately retrieving reference information.

I use Microsoft Word. A thesis: each chapter in one document. Then, I will integrate them together, after having finished all chapters.

Here is a comparison that I agree with:

http://openwetware.org/wiki/Word_vs._LaTeX

Compared to Latex in many areas, MSWorld loses mainly in price, scientific features and speed big docs with graphics.

If you want to do text with scientific notation, Latex is the better option. With latex you can write equation, to use greek and mathematic symbols, reference your figures, tables, equation, and bibliography. The problem is in LATEX you have to learn the routines of the format or action that you need. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

I have utilized MS Word along with an Excell spreadsheet format with success.

Use Apple Mountain Lion OS and their Pages and Quicktime specialised software. OS ML supports native (icloud) speech to text softeware conversion inline. All my own work will be done in this manner (totally 'Apple') in future.

Just to share my two cents, I'll give a brief answer to each of your questions.

Do you prefer MS Word, LibreOffice, OpenOffice or another one?

I have been a user of OpenOffice and its variants for a couple of years (OOo back in my Windows days, NeoOffice after switching to Mac, and more recently I switched to LibreOffice) and I really do like the way styles are handled which -in my opinion- is far superior to MS Word. Additionally, Word (2011 that is) does frequently crash on my Mac which makes it cumbersome if not at times impossible to work with.

Which tools for scientific writing (reference manager, formula editor) do you use?

I usually go with MS Word even though I have a deep-rooted aversion against it, but it is the program most of my colleagues and collaborators use. So, in order to avoid incompatibilities I use that. If I can, however, I prefer using LibreOffice. For reference management I swear by Mendeley. For my thesis I used the combination of NeoOffice with BibDesk and some custom programming to get both to connect. I rarely use EndNote. Mostly, if I get references sent by collaborators. Then I usually end up importing these into my Mendeley database.

How do you organize a big document, like a thesis?

For my thesis I created separate files for each chapter. To streamline the layout I created a template that would be linked with each file, so that changes to the template at any time would be reflected in the sub-documents. Finally, all files were combined in a master that contained front matter, TOC, etc.

How do you integrate figures, especially data plots, with your document?

I usually just include them as picture file for illustrating purposes, depending on my source document. I don't really pay much attention to laying out figures as they will be uploaded separately during the submission process. Mostly, I will redraw data plots and other graphs with Adobe Illustrator to give them more quality and in order to be able to do things that wouldn't otherwise be possible (in SPSS, for example).

You might want to visit http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/strings.html, or http://ismp2012.mathopt.org/, don't know what they are using these days, but they could be insightful.

Matlab would be good but I have not used it in years. I use Excel exclusively now, copy and paste to my documents. You can also create jpegs and stick a picture into the document.

Latex is pretty old fashion technology. I used to use Troff, but Bell withdrew updates from the market after the designer died. Quark Express, Adobe Indesign, Word 2007, and Open Office have all been tested. Quark and Indesign are industry standard programs that cost thousands of dollars and tech support does not exist for the small time user. I don't like anything that Adobe makes, everything comes out looking like photoshop or one of the new updates. I'm using Word stuff because it is easy to use, and if you have any programmer in you, it is possible to alter formulas and get Excel to crunch them.

If you decide to go with Open Office remember that it has a huge footprint, it insinuates itself into everything you do, it is impossible to delete from your system, and uses up resources like a Republican on speed.

As for the formal paper writing thing - you might want to visit Perrla as they have formatting for APA 5th and 6th Edition - templates save time and improve correctness, and if you visit the University of Purdue OWL program or Capella Univeristy Writing Center you can garner a great of information about formatting a formal paper.

I forgot to mention - Matlab 2011 has trial software that you can download and according to their website they perform these key functions:

Parallel for-loops (parfor) for running task-parallel algorithms on multiple processors

Support for CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPUs

Ability to run twelve workers locally on a multicore desktop

Computer cluster and grid support (with MATLAB Distributed Computing Server)

Interactive and batch execution of parallel applications

Distributed arrays and single program multiple data (spmd) construct for large dataset handling and data-parallel algorithms

MS word and Reference Manager are my main tools in scientific writing. Both work well for me.

LyX is available for various operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, UNIX, OS/2 and Haiku. http://www.lyx.org/

I prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice. The style and formatting on the program is far better than MS Word's, and handles large documents much better. I wrote my thesis on OpenOffice and the program performs flawlessly, printing pdfs that were properly bookmarked without any extra work on my part. My area is not, however, scientific writing, so I didn't have formulas, etc. in the paper. Data plots, however, import easily from OpenOffice's spreadsheet program; for more complex programs I'm not sure.

For references I prefer Zotero, especially since it integrates seamlessly with OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

To be honest, I have only played around with Open Office, but I wrote my dissertation on MS Word on my Mac. It did crash once or twice, but I have trained myself to save after every page or two. I also am averse to Microsoft, but in reality, MS Word for Mac 2011 has many features that made it very useful for a dissertation. Since we must submit electronically using embedded fonts, it was particularly good since MS Word for Mac automatically embeds fonts.

I just finished my honors dissertation, using LibreOffice and was generally content about it. While Libre is fairly user friendly, the open sourcing makes easy and possible to adjust it to your specific wishes - and I love that.

I use MS word. It is versatile & malleable for several applications

I use LibreOffice (former OpenOffice). I my opinion it is a very good software for both scientific and nonscientific publications. I believe that all problems mentioned by LaTeX funs are related to low knowledge about Libre/Open Office environment. I wrote many publications and Ph.D. Dissertation, with mathematical formulas and complex structure, without any problem.

LibreOffice has a styles system which allow for control of the text structure. So user can automatically generate lists of contents, tables or illustrations. Using the style user (like in LaTeX) may don't care about final layout.

The way user creates and edits mathematical formulas is similar to that in LaTeX - and I didn't meet (up to now) any formula that couldn't be wrote in LibreOffice. There is also converter between Latex and Libreoffice math (http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/texmaths-1/releases/0.36).

For bibliographic purpose there is a special tool in LibreOffice but user can also useplug-ins for external tool like Zotero.

Last thing - illustration as a vector graphic. I create vector graphic in the LibreOffice Draw module and then I copy it to Writer so illustration is still vector type and there is no problem with resolution (even after export to PDF). I also use Matlab and I don't find any problem in the insertion of the Matlab figs (as metafile - vector graphic) into a text.

The main disadvantage of LaTeX (for me) is problem with group working (correction, reviews etc) and necessity of switching between views (or you have to read the text with metalanguage phrases). I believe that LaTeX is similar to HTML with CSS so everyone how created one bigger WWW page known how "convenient" it is.

There is also converter between Latex and Libreoffice (http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/).

Firstly, I tried to use an open office but later I reallized that I didn't know how to communicate with my colleaque around the world becausemost of them use MS word

I read the topic know libre but i use only ms office today only i try

I Prefer MS Office because it is an awesome platform for Documentations and others type of office suite. Actually I used OpenOffice in my Ubuntu for a while but I backed to Windows 7 and Office 2010. for my thesis, I'm using now MS office 2010 and I found a proper and a facilitate reference manager, editor, Auto Correction spelling and Grammar Mechanism. However, I suffering in writing some formula .

LaTeX for any document preparation... (Once you get used to it, it is much better, easier, and much better looking!!!) If you don't care about looks of your document, than you can continue with MS office or Open Office... However, I think powerpoint is still the choice for presentations... GNUPlot for plots.

@Rung Charoenwisal: OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice allow you to save documents in Ms format .doc, .xls... and, of course, convert that to .pdf without using other tools like Acrobat.

Hi there, I find Apache openoffice writer very comfortable to write my thesis.and the math function is so much user friendly if you have to write equations.With MS Word it gets a little annoying and tedious. Besides it can do everything that MS office tools can. But the problem is if you try to convert a openoffice file to a word file,the equations can't be converted and that's the only problem I had so far.

@Dieter: Very briefly my software setup, which are all free programs:

For wordprocessing -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/latest/download

For document management -- http://www.qiqqa.com/70557

One big (10 Meg) file contains all my chapters to facilitate quick global finding in the thesis/book.

Running Picasa first and pressing PrtSc will capture any figure that can be displayed -- http://picasa.google.com/

1) MS Word is the worst program I have ever used for anything.

2) Despite what anyone tells you LaTeX is not actually very difficult to learn.

3) Since 95% of academic writing needs to be formatted as a manuscript and since different journals' preferred formats differ, LaTeX's separation of content and format makes complete sense. Need to resubmit, change the format package from Journal of A to Journal of B.

4) Very few journals actually provide LaTeX style files for their preferred formats and that is a crime.

5) Many journals explicitly require a MS Word .docx and not a .pdf (let alone a .dvi!)

6) 95% of academics use the most conveniently available software which is what:

a) they are used to

b) is pre-installed on their computer

c) they don't have to personally pay for

d) most other people use

7) Currently, that convenient standard is MS Word

8) It is very difficult for LaTeX users and MS Word users to collaborate.

a) For some odd reason, MS Word users have the logistical high-ground in the argument about which to use

So in the end, I use LaTeX for everything I can but I have to keep Word around.

I have started using Scrivener, which is a marvellous tool for writing longer texts. Less scrolling back and forth, better overview of the text and each chapter, easier to change the order of chapters and possibility to write notes and see them on the sidebar. Scrivener also has a full screen mode. However, I can't use reference management system with it. I'm a mac user, which pretty much limits the use of such software anyway. I use Mendeley, which is fine but only works with MS Word or OpenOffice. I haven't tried OpenOffice and utterly dislike Word... But, if the text has to be emailed to someone, it needs to be converted to MS Word or pdf. It is easy to do though, just hit the "compile" button and select a suitable export alternative.

I have used only ms office for everything because....i have never tried anythingn else. It works too well for me to think abt others. In future will try others.

Thesis: i kept separate word files for each chapter etc, all i had to keep in mind was ensure page no continuity.

Graphs: mostly built using excel.

Statistics: statplus

Pictures: tiffs

I use libreoffice- when I encounter compatibility problems, I either ask for a PDF version (students) or use a virtual machine with some word version running in it. The main reason for using libreoffice is that it is immediately available, and it does what I need it to do (albeit poorly). The only regular usage is presentations for students, where I have to quickly put something together. Working with any implementation of these 'office suites' usually ends up in anger and frustration, so I try to avoid the use of these programs where possible.

As I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, the toolchain question is perhaps moot, but I typically employ bibtex (references), mendeley (reference management, PDF annotations), inkscape or tikz (images), mysql workbench (processing data), a bunch of bash scripts with the usual utilities (format output of databae to data files for plotting), and gnuplot (graphs). At some point I considered uniting all the data operations into a small python program, but I haven't found the time/need to do so.

Some of you have commented on Libre Office versus NeoOffice. I have mostly used NeoOffice, on MacOS, and have found it to be very stable, powerful, and fairly easy to use. Do any of you find significant benefits in Libre Office with respect to NeoOffice? I find that the more recent versions of Libre Office seem to be more stable than they had been but I'm not sure of any advantages with respect to NeoOffice. On the other hand, regarding bibliographies and citations, I find Zotero very powerful, flexible, stable, free, and compatible with all of the above and truly cross-platform.

The question of which word processor to use solely depends on one's exposure to that particular software. Microsoft office, especially the latest versions like 2010+ come with MS Word that integrates almost everything. From desktop publishing to scientific writings like research articles and theses. Some people find difficulty in accommodating specific tasks and that is why they are inclined towards other word processors.

So for MS Word users: Search for particular options available on google if seemingly not present on MS Word. I give MS Word +10.

I have to agree with R. Stansfield, TeX is not so user friendly as a word, but the work written in TeX is visually perfect especially for the math.

1. Word processors: MIcrosoft Word or Openoffice / Libreoffice

LaTeX is definitely superior to any other WYSIWYG word-processor around in handling math and PDF figures. Yes, PDF figures i.e. vector images. That makes the quality of manuscript. I am frustrated in creating a vector image to be included in Microsoft Word. EMF seems to be the only vector format that works in Word; but not many graphic programs can output proper EMF. 

Try out SciFlow, it unifies writing, collaborating, importing references for citing as well as formatting your paper to your needs in one place, at no cost.

https://www.sciflow.net

try this:

https://www.sciflow.net