MikTeX
Writing articles with Word (95-2007) is for me still a huge challenge. I like the program for quickly formatted, short documents. For official publications I prefer to use LaTeX. The initial steep learning curve for LaTeX was quite a hurdle. However, it is much preferred over the steep stress-curve that Word creates for the camera-ready version.
My resources for LaTeX:
Installation:
MikTeX (LaTeX for windows)
TeXnicCenter (great freeware replacement for WinEdt)
Dropbox (Work on document from multiple computers)
Templates
SIGCHI-template (2005) (cls-file)
Elsevier style (ctan page)
Thesis template (ctan page)
Really useful packages
hyperref (for bookmarks in PDF, ctan page)
todonotes (for revisions, ctan page)
color (for colored text, ctan page)
Tweaks
Use GSview to determine viewport dimensions to eliminate white space from imported pdf-figures (Brendan Hogan)
Controlling floats when all pics end up at the end (Andrew T. Young)
Fixing wrong labels: The command \label must appear after (or inside) \caption. Otherwise, it will pick up the current section or list number instead of what you intended. (wikibooks on cross referencing)
The natbib \citet and \citep are not included in the auto-complete list of TeXnicCenter. Edit the tex.xml file in the program-directory to add them to the auto-complete list.
Using a tilde (~) between “figure” and the reference number (e.g. figure~\ref{fig:anyfigure}) prevents a linebreak between “figure” and the reference number.
Look-up math-symbols by drawing them @ detexify