I’ll be the first to admit that if you can be bothered getting your hands dirty, LaTeX makes documents look pretty damn sweet. But there are times when the fuss of setting up distros and then beating LaTeX into submission just isn’t worth it (positioning figures, anyone?). If you just need to throw a quick document together, but want people to think you’re a LaTeX pro, you can get passable results using Word 2007 with a few tweaks:

1. First, download the Computer Modern and Latin Modern fonts. Word 2007 supports the OpenType format so get that. Don’t be disheartened by how these fonts look onscreen – some look like total arse, but let’s face it, these fonts were not designed for the screen at all. They look fine when printed or even in a PDF if you zoom in far enough. And stick with “LM Roman 12″ as it has the proper bold font, others may look strange. You can find even more fonts if you install a LaTeX distro like MikTeX and search the installation folder for *.pfm files.
2. If you want to approximate BibTeX-style references, get the IEEE citation stylesheet for Microsoft Word 2007 and extract to
   C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style.
3. Set up your heading sizes and turn on 1.2.3 section numbering. I can’t be bothered explaining how so here’s a sample word document to get you started.
4. Make sure you use the LM fonts for all figures and diagrams for consistency. However, for built-in equations, you’re stuck with Cambria Math, which Microsoft built especially for equations, but it doesn’t look too bad.

When you’ve finished your document it should look something like this PDF of the sample template linked to above.

Word is being funny, you are messing around with equations that aren’t behaving right. You try to save and it won’t let you save for some reason. You think “Oh I’ll just restart to make Word all better again.” You restart and your effing document won’t open with an error something like:

The Office Open XML file FileName.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.

WTF!? This was your only copy of the document! OMG! After you have taken a vallium, do the following:

Click Details on the error dialog and note down the location of the error (e.g. /word/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 65946).

Rename your faulty document to FileName.docx.zip and extract it into some folder.

Open up the XML file listed in the error message and locate the offending column. For this you might want to download XML Copy Editor or any other editor that has the features we need. You can see the column number in the status bar.

The offending error will probably be an XML tag. In my case column 65946 was at the * below (* has been added)

... </w:t></m:r><m:ctrlPr*><w:rPr><w:rFonts w:ascii="Cambria Math" ...

So the error is in the <m:ctrlPr> tag. Now you need to add a fake attribute to the tag called a="aaaaa" or something easily identifiable that won’t occur naturally in the Office XML. Your tag should look like this.

<m:ctrlPr a="aaaaa">

By default, the XML is all on one line to save on space, but we need to fix that to delete this tag.

In XML Copy Editor, select Pretty print from the XML menu. Now search for “aaaaa” or whatever you called your fake attribute. You should now be able to visually see the entire tag.

<m:ctrlPr a="aaaaa">
  <w:rPr>
    <w:rFonts w:ascii="Cambria Math" w:hAnsi="Cambria Math"/>
    <w:i/>
    <w:lang w:val="en-AU"/>
  </w:rPr>
</m:ctrlPr>

Now just delete the whole <m:ctrlPr> tag and save the document. You can leave it in Pretty Print, it will still be valid XML.

Re-ZIP the contents of the folder you extracted to and rename document back to FileName.docx.

Try to open in Office 2007. If it works, Hooray! If it doesn’t, and you get another error, repeat this process. Else retype your 10,000 word document!