LaTeX is a great choice for professional formatting. The following tutorial is a bit unusual but it will result into a high quality typographic layout. First step is to write the text itself. The best way in doing so is the markdown syntax. The main advantage is, that hierarchical sections can be defined. These sections are displayed in a text editor as an outline so there is no need to use a dedicated outline editor but a normal text editor works pretty well for this job.
If the text was created and proofread it has to be converted into the TeX format.
pandoc -o paperlatex.tex -s paper.md
The next step is to modify the header of the latex file so that it will look like MS-Word and libreoffice:
\usepackage{wordlike} % word like fonts and TOC
\usepackage[none]{hyphenat} % deactivate hyphenation
\setlength{\parskip}{8pt} % deactivate vertical glue
\setlength{\topskip}{0pt} % deactivate vertical glue