AB,
LaTeX is a "friendly" front-end for TeX (well, sort-of).
Basically, it's a mark-up language that in many respects doesn't look
too unlike HTML. If you can write raw HTML, then you could get started with documets using LaTeX fairly quickly...
Personally, I wouldn't trust anything longer that about two pages to any of Mr Gates products
The number of times that even in short documents it manages to second-guess what I don't want incorrectly...
