Efficiency in LaTeX vs Word always depends on what you are doing. At one job I was using bash, Powershell, pdftk and LaTeX to extract data from PDFs, VLookup using Powershell, and then annotate the PDF with the result using LaTeX transparencies (remember to run twice). Really simple stuff. It was a shit task to do before it was scripted with LaTeX. (five hours of mind numbing work vs 15 minutes of run time, plus it gave me a window of time for a coffee run). Use the right tool for the job, which in my case, turned out to be a Rube-Goldberg machine.