I dunno what a PI is, but my honours thesis supervisor was the person who first introduced me to TeX. And gods, I wish I had known about it earlier in uni, or even back in high school. It is so useful when writing any sort of papers with sections and diagrams and bibliography.
Aka, old fucks who don't even know how to save a PDF. Also the only reason I can't work with modern tools, including sending a OneDrive link for a manuscript in Word. We get to pass around a million copies of the same Word file like animals.
Un(?)fortunately I don't have much cause these days for either TeX or some equivalent to it. Anything I'm writing today is simple enough that it doesn't need anything more sophisticated than markdown for formatting.
Then start writing in Markdown. Markdown is easier in syntax, supports LaTeX equations, has metadata and is in plain text so you can use git. And the killer feature is you can use pandoc to convert the markdown file into word, pptx, LaTeX pdfs, html etc. you can also setup a make file that runs pandoc when you ask like this
I also have my reports in latex inside a git repo, complete with a makefile to generate graphs from csv containing simulation results. However I am too ashamed to publish the entire version control to a public repo
.gitattributes can invoke Word on windows to diff versions, and there are plenty of open source scripts that can do it if you don't have a copy of Word (or Windows) lying around.
But Word is like shit for papers. Use LaTeX instead.
Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway, especially if writing docs is your professional responsibility?
Why not use Git+Markdown+Pandoc, have your copy, data and layout separate?
I understand that a lot of istitutions/companies impose stylistic/technical requirements for docs and publications, - still doesn't mean you gotta stay married to the worst tooling.