The basic mode of Latex, of interleaving text with obscure commands, was largely obsolete interface-wise at least 15 years ago. Like XML? ;)
Many journals require TeX, so if you intend to publish more than one paper, you'll have to learn. It's not wysiwyg, but there are some systems that get pretty close, re-rendering at a single keystroke. Writing a book in MS Word is masochistic. It was designed for short documents (around 50 pages) and documents begin to crumble under their own weight after that. The equation editor in word is mostly mouse driven, so if you want to be able to just type an equation, it's painful. OpenOffice has a different approach that allows you to type an expression that gets rendered as math. -- Mike Stay staym@clear.net.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~msta039