RE: By the way: I handed in my Master-Thesis
Word processors are evil. Not just MS Words, but any word processor; because they are built upon the wrong paradigm. Then it becomes a disaster if the software misbehaves, and MS Words is famous to be not totally compatible with itself :-D
Unfortunately people still use WPs too much, even though publishing solution like TeX&co. are far superior for many many cases. Also solution like markdown are good for some kind of publishing (if I remember well, there's at least a tech publishing company whose publishing chain uses markdown, so that authors can submit their stuff in markdown…)
But too many publishers ask authors to use MS Word or Open/LibreOffice. I am thinking about novels publishers, because in the scientific community publishers (of engineering, mathematics, physics, as far as I know) LaTeX is widely accepted.
Nowadays epub can be easily generated from a markdown source, so writing a novel in a WP would be silly — I think so, but few friends of mine who like writing told me they need to see the “pages” as they write. (That could be resolved with previewing, but they don't like what I had proposed… discussion closed! :-))