[munchhausen]

Grandparent sold pandoc short. It is actually a really nifty utility capable of converting a plethora of formats from/to each other. It is a godsend for situations when you have to create MS Office-compatible documents, and want to avoid the inevitable muscle cramps you'd get if you were to actually use Word.

You can create your own document templates, and tweak the resulting output in a million ways. At my job, I have to create a lot of documentation, often in PDF or docx, and Pandoc has become an integral part of my workflow. I can create documents within the comfortable environment of Emacs, and use Pandoc to produce output in any old format that $pointy_haired_boss may desire.