I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.

Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.

> I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…

LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.

If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.

Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.

For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.

Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.

Not everything is papers and theses. Not an academic but I can imagine Excel being quite useful.