I did the same in high school, and now at uni it is paying off, my work looks great and is at least as easy to write as in a modern word processor except for good spelling and grammar checking. I haven't found a great solution for that yet.
Be sure to keep your tables looking good, look for some resources on it, it's amazing how shoddy even the default tables in LaTeX look, never mind the Excel spreadsheet look everyone seems to go for.
I've been using TeXstudio as a LaTeX editor - it's a fork of TeXmaker with more features (notably a user-editable spelling dictionary). The UI is Qt, and it's available cross-platform.
Be sure to keep your tables looking good, look for some resources on it, it's amazing how shoddy even the default tables in LaTeX look, never mind the Excel spreadsheet look everyone seems to go for.