Word stinks.

Last month I encountered a funding opportunity which only accepted proposals in Micro$oft Word format. I thought this was bizarre, and I didn't quite finish the proposal. "Why the hell would anyone write a technical document in Word," I thought. Since then, I decided to write a full-on proposal using MS Word. I'm about 1/3 of the way through that proposal, and I have arrived at my conclusions regarding Word: "Why the hell would anyone write a technical document in Word?" This program sucks ass. It is very difficult to do anything technical in Word. I have spent days studying how to manage Figures and Tables and References, mostly to no avail.

I found this site over at Microsoft which offers advice on writing tech docs in Word. Some of the highlights:

• "Word has no built-in solution for making a list of references and inserting citations to those references in the text."
• "Although Microsoft Word has an equation numbering feature as part of its caption feature, it puts the equation number either above or below the equation, not on the same line as is normally done."
• "A text box is the most obvious way to place figures where you want them, but it suffers from two problems. One is that text boxes tend to jump around as the document's text is edited, sometimes even jumping into the margin. I have no solution for this problem, although there is a solution using Visual Basic from www.officevba.com described here."

These problems ought to be enough to drive away any experienced LaTeX user (LaTeX will practically write your document for you, easily generate complicated equations, handle numbered and multiline equations, size and place your figures, handle caption formatting and numbering, manage bibliographies, adapt to the style requirements of your journal, etc). I thought I would still give Word a chance, though, and see what it has to say about citations. A package called "Endnote" is recommended for managing bibliographies. I went down to my University Bookstore and had a look. Endnote costs 300 fucking US dollars! What a goddamn ripoff! BibTeX and LaTeX handle all your bibliographic needs, have done so since forever, and have done it for free. In addition, LyX is available for those who prefer WYSYWIG-like GUI interfaces, and JabRef is a Java-based GUI platform for managing bibliographic databases. And they are all free, and they work great. Once you have set up a working LaTeX environment, you can write dozens of papers without ever having fuck with formatting.

Conclusions:

• MS Word + Endnote = expensive shit.
• LaTeX + LyX + BibTeX + JabRef = free gold!

So I ask one last time: "Why does anyone use Word?" A number of other faculty in my department use Word for their papers and proposals. Why!? It sucks!!!