How can I convert my TeX-illiterate coworkers to LaTeX?

Convincing people is difficult. Mainly because we tend to be too conservative.

Here are some of my advice for your presentation:

1. Do NOT show about the preamble. If your company was ever to change to a TeX based solution it should be because of its superior functionality inside and that the preamble should be the same for the entire company. Ensure that people should understand, that they need only considering the common things in TeX, itemize, description, equation, align, section, ...

2. Show what can be done from a single document, i.e. take your favourite \documentclass and show that the same code can be used to generate two very different results, merely by changing one thing (make two layouts and create two classes). Do that, Office (ok, it has styles... but...)! When the company changes, logo, CEO, or whatever, you can immediately create all previously created documents with the corrected things.

3. Don't delve too much on the fact that floats are floats, but rather, show some bad examples of figure placement in Office, single lines above top figures etc., to make people comfortable with the fact that they (in principle) should not decide where to place floats. Again, the document class can alter the way floats are placed.

4. Show that dividing a document into several files makes management much easier than having to edit a 200 page Office document. Furthermore, it allows people to edit files simultaneously (be careful here :) ). Also in this regard a version control system can centralize all documents and keep a searchable history. Binary files are often version controlled by copies and date-marks. 20 MB binary documents with 200 history revisions takes up 4Gb of space, how much of that has changed? Maybe 20 MB?

5. Show a simple example of figures, two figures beside each other, side-caption. And nothing more. (I often see side-captions in Office-documents, even though I am not that keen on using them).

6. Show them how equations are typeset, again simple examples, show them how references work to label equations (I would not go too deep into the fact that you need several recompilations to achieve the effect). Show them that you can leave a reference in a document, even if you remove the referenced text. When you re-instantiate the text again you will retain the previous reference, as expected. If you ever did that to an Office document, you would loose the reference.

7. Show them beautiful showcases of TeX-created stuff. There are quite a few lists on this page which has TikZ, beautiful typographical documents, etc.

All of the above points to an efficient and streamlined way to handle documents. Possible you could show them about the fact that German train tables are generated by LaTeX, see LaTeX in industry.

Tell them that backwards compatibility is a virtue in TeX. No need to transfer old documents to new versions (ok, not the full story, but more or less).

So maybe I already went too far, but take a pick of the ones seems more fit for your company.

Your colleagues are probably already bored of you droning on about LaTeX's virtues, so you giving a presentation will make it worse. Invite Stefan's Grandma to give a presentation.

The best way to convince is efficiency. Find examples in which the use of LaTeX is far more efficient than MS Office. Of course, these examples should be relevant to your field of work. Possible aspects on which to focus are:

• Modularity: Don't invent the wheel again, take what's been invented by other people
• Programmability: A single, cleverly used \newcommand can suffice.
• Level of Boilerplate: Could be dangerous, as there are also many good templates for office products.
• Cooperative working: Show, how easy it is to separate content and format. One person is responsible for formatting. Others are responsible for content. Find examples here, how easily the others might unexpectedly and unintentionally crash the intended formatting or layout.

Another way to convice might be control. In TeX and LaTeX you have total control over nearly everything. Some control mechanisms are more complicated than others, but all is well documented. Find some examples, where this isn't true for MS Office.

And the last way to convince might be asthetics. Show some beauties of TeX-Art and their short source code.

Additionally, you can do a contest. But be careful that you don't run into something where Office products might be better suited than TeX.