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In my experience, formatting is just about the only thing that a department/university cares about (outside of the folks on the committee), and they will send back a thesis until they're satisfied with the formatting, and that means lost time. Perhaps throwaway_7274's department has a reputation for particular attention to (meaningless) detail.

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While there are formatting guidelines, I've never seen them so specific that you could only easily do it in Latex. Is that really common?

I've never actually see it as the assumed default option.. Maybe a decade back I could see that.. but not now.

I think there’s a Latex template you can use, or you have to make your own document that looks as similar as possible. It’s not a list of guidelines but a template that specifies how it’s supposed to look.

The matter isn't really that something is possible only in latex, but that a department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity that you would have to reimplement

> department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity

I think there is a limit to how complex they can be. If you can't do it relatively easily in Word, then it's probably going to create too many complaints for the bureaucrats

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