Motivation

Some general information about LaTeX, why you should use it for writing scientific papers, how to install and use it can be found here and here. LaTeX is known to have a somewhat steep learning curve, because it does not follow the "What you see is what you get" principle. From my point of view learning LaTeX is worthwhile. Some arguments to justify the effort to get into LaTeX are listed below.

One major advantage of LaTeX is consistent formatting. If the code describing the formatting of paper is correct, there cannot be any formatting errors. Following the styleguide, using correct spelling and grammar make up more than a half of the BA Dresden's assessment, so you can basically pass any required scientific work without content but correct formatting. A rule, which easily creates violations of the styleguide, is that every citation after the first has to replace the author and year with "ebenda". You might do it right while writing the paper the first. After receiving feedback you might copy blocks of text around. Obviously, this will move citations and if inattentive violate the rule. Moreover, this template sorts the abbreviations and provides the full term on the first occurrence automatically, creates compliant bibliography, creates compliant references on images and so on.

Additionally, LaTeX can easily be used with version control systems. This makes working in a group super easy, because LaTeX separates the document's content from its design. Furthermore, there is only a single, correct and reproducible version. Copies containing different versions cannot exist. General tips and workflow recommendations about LaTeX with Git can be found is this question on StackOverflow. If you are using GitHub reviews could be made with pull requests.

Unfortunately, the BA styleguide makes the usage of LaTeX for the average user unnecessarily hard. There is no style included in LaTeX, which fulfills the requirements of the BA. That is why this template has been created.