cc demure yellownissan 4TRANdan I have actually worked with LaTeX in projects before, twice. Last year we used Overleaf to collaborate on a report; a few years ago I tried LaTeX myself. I think it works great for getting a technical report out that doesn't look ugly. It makes difficult equations easy and can make simple documents or articles nice in little to no time. For a while, my CV was in LaTeX. That said, using it left a bad taste in my mouth. I've found the templates to be wholly unsatisfactory, inflexible and generally a pain to deviate from the norm. I consider myself a designer so I do want to customize my layout, I just don't want it in the dreadful way that MS Word does. Package and file management was buggy both offline and online for me. (Or I just didn't get it, that's also likely, but I definitely tried.) The Overleaf 40-page report had 12 packages that added necessary functionalities but resulted in the packages conflicting regularly and randomly. Syntax is, after using it frequently, readable but it feels more like writing code and less like writing. So my general feel towards LaTeX is that it introduces more problems than it solves.
Handling figures is the thing Word sucks most at, and I still don't know a good way to work around it. All the other aspects of managing a thesis/dissertation are doable with Word though. Auto-generated TOCs that update, sections and chapters, etc. goobster is right about Word: you have to fight on its turf. The features are there, but not necessarily in the way or place you expect them to be, but they are for the most part there.
I've figured out how it "thinks", and can make anything inserted (images, spreadsheets, other objects, etc) pretty much play nice. And if I can't I can always build that one page in InDesign (or whatever) output it to PDF, and insert that one page into the final PDF file as a replacement, before I print it. But man... there is NO WAY anybody else could collaborate with me on what I do. It's a completely broken process that only works because I have cobbled it together from the bits and pieces of apps that actually work. Handling figures is the thing Word sucks most at, and I still don't know a good way to work around it.
The trick to Word is to imagine that there's a vengeful poltergeist named Clippy lurking in the code and every now and then you have to click on extraneous radio buttons and disclosure triangles to appease his hunger for GUI-fucking. As soon as you accept that it's possessed you can just sorta go with the flow. Granted, it's bombastically retarded that in the year 2017 we have to put up with this shit but hey - vengeful ghosts.
My tip: perhaps try making whatever it is you need in PowerPoint. I've found it's much easier to design with, it has a layer panel and I think that if you meddle around with the settings you can set the page size to letter and export to PDF. I actually designed a small app using PowerPoint using the Appear and Disappear animations for my work.