[MikeW]

When writing my dissertation I burned a couple of days trying to get up to speed with LaTeX as it came so highly recommended by smart people I respect. However the tooling let me down. Now I understand one of the joys of LaTeX is the ability to write with any text editor but there were a many things I wish made my life easier. Like an editor that actually ships with Spelling, tag completion, helpers and importantly... good documentation for how the UI works.

I was constantly frustrated. What about inserting a picture? I was pointed to packages to try to locate for my OS & install, perl scripts to convert my PNGs to whatever format my tex distribution uses. I wished whatever editor I used had a simple Insert->Picture menu that could do all of the work behind the scenes.

So I ditched that and bought Office 2010 Student edition for €69 and wrote my dissertation in Word. I got the formatting just how I wanted it within a few hours. The Navigation View was fantastic for visualising the structure of my document. I was able to drag and drop paragraphs, sections, chapters around with ease and even though I spent a few hours fiddling with the styles, I was able to turn out a PDF that looked absolutely terrific that had none of the formatting mess in that article.

I will take the time to learn LaTeX better in the future, but if minds are to be won, better intuitive tools need to be built that HELP the writer, not writing long articles saying why it's the best.