Though Microsoft’s Office programs technically use open standards, they’re still proprietary software that doesn’t give you a lot of options for extending or modifying functionality. LaTeX has a lot of great features for technical/scientific writing, plus decades of add-ons and extensions. It’s also notoriously difficult to learn, so you’ll often trade Word’s figures that get lost in the stratosphere for less-than-helpful error messages.
Quarto is pretty new, but provides some pretty neat features for writing and documentation. It’s built on top of Pandoc, so it can produce multiple different formats, including webpages and presentations, using much friendlier Markdown syntax. It also has a lot of built-in features for code documentation, including the ability to run code blocks and include the output in your document.
Since everything is written in Markdown (i.e., plain text), it’s easy to version control your documents with git and see what changes you’ve made over time. I used it for almost all the lectures and assignments in my Python class, and found the ability to set formatting and styles in a single place (instead of copy-pasting from a template) far less annoying.
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