etc., and import them with a cut and paste. * Once you know LaTeX, everything is faster and easier, especially because you can save old solutions for formatting, shortcut macros, etc. Kind of sad, but that's the way things are (and have been for the past decade). And so either your manuscript will be full of errors that you have to hope you will catch and correct when you get page proofs, or you will have to end up using Word anyway. (I have tried repeatedly.) It's not that OpenOffice/LibreOffice can't do the right thing, it's that the journals only support Word. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not yet compatible enough for publication-quality work.

doc files and only some take other formats.

If you are in any non-equation-heavy field, use MS Office, for the simple reason that every journal takes. Use a front end like LyX if you want some WYSIWYGness. Otherwise you will not be writing your equations rapidly or with ease (compared to those who know LaTeX)*.

If you are in a field with lots of equations, the journals you are going to publish in will almost certainly take.

Open office versus libre office