[piotrkubisa]

I think the lack of spreadsheet-based software is more problematic than just Word, because it's hard to replace it with any good alternative.

Also, I do use LaTeX (and derivatives) in almost in any case when I need to compose some document - it really helps to automatize many trivial things that were tiresome to do in MSO Word. However I know at least few people who tried LaTeX and just told me "Yuck!". I tried to recognize what is unique selling point, and all of those people told me it lacked the WYSIWYG mode and that they do not want to learn some language, so also ignore the LaTeX meta-code [0]. I feel I can't objectively say how steep learning curve is, because I just got used to declarative paradigm. LaTeX is not perfect, but I guess my requirements were different than my friends had, but I can't find an answer what really makes Word better than let's say LaTeX, LibreOffice/OpenOffice or other software in the same category? What leads us to decision to use Word not other software to let's say write thesis in it?

[0] As copperx mentioned, there is already LyX but it is far from being popular application.

[thecount122195]

I haven't found a good replacement for Excel, maybe its because I learned all my shortcuts in it and anytime I go to something else it just feels "off". I would say the learning curve wasn't to bad for short documents or non-technical stuff I would say word has the edge because its east to just open a new document and type away. For my thesis I chose to use LaTeX because anytime I would try to insert a figure or a table into word it would destroy the whole pages formatting , and equations in word are just awful to format. I saw a picture once that showed exactly how I feel about LaTeX's difficulty I'll see if I can find it.

edit: here it is http://blog.adnanmasood.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mikte...