Expectations differ from results

FYI don’t use empty lines as spacing. Instead use breaks.

Insert > Page Break (for quick and easy breaks that start on then next page)

Or…if you need something more specific

Layout > Breaks >

Text Wrapping (to make sure things like captions, etc move below an embedded object like a picture, table, etc)

Section Break (for the same layout/flow but potentially different styles, numbers/bullet lists reset, etc)

Column Break (if you’re doing multi column layout and you want the next thing to be at the top of the next column)

There are others

Ctrl+Enter for page break
- So useful that it’s one of the breaks with an easy shortcut key
Tables if you want very specific layouts for lots of discrete items.
Yup, them's the breaks.
Ok now do one for confluence pages.

exhale

ctrl z

"fuck"

Don't use a document editor for page layout.

This is the way. Don’t let Word confuse you into believing it’s a DTP program.

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior LaTeX?

Fuck LaTeX. I hate it with all my being. It sucks.

It's just the best option I have found so far so I can't let it go
- Most regular documents can be done with a markup renderer, e.g. Asciidoc
LaTeX and the wonderful world of \looseness=-1, manual linebreaks and negative vspace

(but it's still leagues ahead of word)
- I'm rooting for Typst to grow into something better.
- Currently working in LaTeX for work.
  
  I don't think you really need looseness (I assume you want to avoid single lines?), you can rather increase the badness of them so that they're avoided through other means.
  
  Manual line breaks I only use in tables (thanks tabularray author). In text, I don't think I have any.
  
  Negative vspace I also don't have, what's your use case? I can imagine it for very specific tasks (a special page like a title page it something similar where everything is set very precisely) but for normal writing, I didn't encounter it.
  
  All in all, I think LaTeX shows its age, but the huge ecosystem is the main reason it's still a good choice despite a little of shortcomings like the arcane macro system, features that are seemingly impossible to implement like accessibility (
  
  (but it's still leagues ahead of word)
  
  My current document approached 50 pages with about 10 tables, 3 figures (tikz) and 10 bibliography entries and it's perfectly handleable. Just informing having to do that with word gives me agony. I worked on the same type of document in word that was kind of an earlier draft by someone else and stuff broke left and right, and that was without the more complex formatting that I later employed.
  
  As someone else answered, I'm also looking forward to typst. Unfortunately, PDFs generated by it are currently much larger than through LaTeX (https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/895, fix currently not in any stable version) and package import is a preview. Some features aren't implemented yet but would be really nice, the syntax seems really sane and it's fast, so I'm optimistic it can become a strong contender.
Alternatively, there's Scribus if you really want fine grained control.

Perhaps you should have used all the format tools at your disposal.

Okay, I'll bite. What formatting tools specifically would you recommend for placing a figure or table close to where it appears in the text (say at the top of the page where the figure/table is first mentioned)?