What office package is good for academic writing purpose? These three are the most popular for a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style rich text editor.
PS: Avoid LateX reference please. This question is for lazy writers like me who wants to write rapidly and with ease!
If you are in a field with lots of equations, the journals you are going to publish in will almost certainly take .tex. So write in LaTeX. Otherwise you will not be writing your equations rapidly or with ease (compared to those who know LaTeX)*. Use a front end like LyX if you want some WYSIWYGness.
If you are in any non-equation-heavy field, use MS Office, for the simple reason that every journal takes .doc files and only some take other formats. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not yet compatible enough for publication-quality work. (I have tried repeatedly.) It's not that OpenOffice/LibreOffice can't do the right thing, it's that the journals only support Word. And so either your manuscript will be full of errors that you have to hope you will catch and correct when you get page proofs, or you will have to end up using Word anyway. Kind of sad, but that's the way things are (and have been for the past decade).
*Once you know LaTeX, everything is faster and easier, especially because you can save old solutions for formatting, shortcut macros, etc. etc., and import them with a cut and paste. But it does take a non-negligible amount of time to learn, so if you're too impatient to learn new skills or under a very tight time deadline right now, LaTeX is not for you. Unless you're doing equations--LaTeX still does those enough better that you may as well just use it regardless.
The answer depends a lot on one's field of work, where the end product will appear, whether the collaborator's mutually agree upon the package and finally the OS one use.
Most journals or conferences accept manuscripts in DOC or DOCX format; other than TeX. Native formats of OpenOffice or LibreOffice are not [always] supported in most DTP centres/print or publishing houses.
Say, for example if you are in Science; esp in Physics or Mathematics, most of your academic writing will have lot of equations. In that case it better to opt for MS Office (along with MathType). This is because the equation editor that comes with OpenOffice or LibreOffice is not compatible with MS Office and vice versa. The equation either get converted as a figure or appear scrambled when opened in a non-native package.
If the collaborator uses a different package, compatibility is a big problem.
If one has to work in different OS's; compatibility issues comes in there as well. For e.g. MS Office cannot function natively on Linux systems.
So considering the fact that the academic work always reach a different kind of post-processing mechanism, it is better to use the most popular package, MS Office.
If typesetting and publishing are done by self/in-house, compatibility is not an issue and any package is as good as any other package.
(As question is about three specific office packages, references to LaTeX is avoided; which may be the best choice, irrespective of one's field of work/typesetting environment as @marc-van-dongen has already pointed out.)
all the major conferences and journals provide templates to use in order to format properly a submission, and they are circulated mostly in doc (Microsoft) and tex (LaTex) formats.
That said, LibreOffice and OpenOffice are mostly identical, but they're divided by a large political/philosophical diatribe (see here). Generally Libre-/OpenOffice can open the doc templates without problems, but they tend to loose some formatting against the latest docx format (see here), and they sometimes "break" the docx files that coauthors give back to LibreOffice users (like in here)
I would highly recommend using a LaTeX whenever possible or Lyx. For Lyx you can also export to LaTex. A recent submission actually only accepted word, but that is not a problem if you start in Lyx or LaTeX. You can export for Lyx to Tex. I have found that if I do need to move to Word for submission or having someone help with editing, I can take the LaTeX/Tex file and use a converter (there are a lot you can try, here is an open source one on SF) to get RTF which will open in Word just fine.
There are also other editors, Such as Scientific Workplace which are more geared towards technical writing.
Another thing you may want to consider is using something very simple like Markdown with some extension for citations and the such. Here are some related links:
You may also want to check out this Stack Overflow question on WYSIWYG vs WYSIWYM
pandoc -s sourcefile.xxx -o outfile.yyy.
Commented
Oct 9, 2012 at 21:12
I wrote my master's report in Microsoft word. Then I moved on to better environments -- I wrote my PhD dissertation in latex.
If you are short on time and are fine with sleepless nights, definitely go for Microsoft word. However, if you have lots of equations in your work, MSWord will just make it look very unprofessional and ugly (but may still be acceptable by your committee).
Your grad school may have "how to do it" videos for MS Word. Have you checked with them to see if they have appropriate templates/packages for MS Word? What does the majority of you group use? If you are short on time, do what is tried and tested, do stuff that you have help readily available for (peers, adviser etc.)
The other option (much harangued obviously 1, 2) is LaTeX. It takes the strain out of writing as you have to only provide content and can concentrate on actually writing instead of spending a lot of time on formatting.
There is a world of difference with LaTeX far superior to Microsoft products, for academic writing. Yes, lots (don't quite have a number right now) of people still use MS Office. They write their theses/dissertations/reports, submit it for review to gradschool, it comes back with formatting corrections (even though they use templates provided by the gradschool). So then they spend countless sleepless hours jutting their images around.
:)
If you really don't want to have LaTeX, then also GoogleDocs may be an option. It has a big advantage, when it comes to collaboration (even for real-time; no problems with mismatching versions of editors, no problems with "which version is the most recent?" or "where (s)he made the changes?").
But also you might consider LyX:
LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).
LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface.
So, in short, you can at the same time write in the way you are used to (without learning anything just to start) and use benefits of LaTeX (formatting, bibliography (!), formulas (!)).
Quite a few of my friends started their adventure with LaTeX with LyX.
As kena said, there are other ways of producting documents. I personnally use org-mode. There are saveral reasons :
When I tried that, I enjoyed it at once :-)
Note : Of course ReStructuredText and Markdown can export to HTML, ODT and LaTeX, but I prefer Org-Mode for its flexibility.
To add to the answers, I would definitely NOT use LibreOffice Writer. It is extremely unstable and my Bachelor student and a friend of mine writing his Master's thesis messed up their files completely last minute. The windows version crashes when a large PDF is to be generated.
I had to help my friend convert all the thesis to LaTeX last minute, which worked perfectly, and I'm using it right now to write my dissertation.
I am surprised no one mentioned reStructured text (here, here). This is a markup syntax where you can write your paper using pure text only. It also support math, automatic conversion to both LaTeX and PDF, and rendering on web pages. Check it out!
