Has anyone used texmaker [1]? It looks like it would be good for beginners to the language, though clunky?
For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort.
For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams.
Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.
https://www.authorea.com/ (though this is not strictly LaTeX)
Well, I learnt a lot about LaTeX while using it for writing my undergradute thesis.
As much I admire LaTeX for its power/customizability, for typical non-tech/business docs I prefer Lyx nowadays. Feels like using MS Word, but powered by LaTeX :p
For beginners or people who don't know / don't want to learn Latex, it's great. It's a bit more clunky if you're more of a latex "power-user" and want to customise stuff, but still possible, though a regular latex editor might be a better choice in that case.