I used to use pandoc for my bachelors papers, which needed to be submitted as word documents. I never used templates but had a rather large "one-liner" pandoc command to convert my markdown files.
At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0].
I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters papers.
I think the tooling around pandoc is what makes it such a good tool. I remember attempting restructured text and latex and having a right hard time.
I don't even know what magic buttons I need to push to get that template to correctly inherit the table format I wanted from pandoc, but it does. I tend to have other scripts though for more complicated tables though. So if I want a table to have a certain row highlighted a different color, I would write a Powershell script to run after the table was generated.
I was never able to figure out how to use LibreOffice to insert the table of contents and then export to PDF (although I can do it via the GUI).
At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0].
I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters papers.
I think the tooling around pandoc is what makes it such a good tool. I remember attempting restructured text and latex and having a right hard time.
[0] https://zettlr.com/ [1] https://quarto.org/