Matthew's Journal

Even allowing for the fact that I learned an awful lot about LaTeX in the process, it probably took me less time and was a lot less hassle than doing it in Word.

I'd agree with that. I used Word for my MPhil and it drove me up the wall at some points. It was supposed to do subdocuments and main documents but I found that the styles all went horribly wrong when I tried to use that. I carried on using Word during the first year of my PhD but then a friend told me about LaTeX and its advantages (which included BiBTeX) and persuaded me to try it. I haven't looked back even if I did spend quite a lot of time in the Michaelmas term of my second year hacking BibTeX stylesheets because I'm an arts student and have to do it differently.