Tables: LaTeX vs. Word

Am starting to wonder if I made the right decision in choosing to write my dissertation in L^AT_EX instead of in MS Word. I need to create a table of information, and need it to:

• be in landscape format (because there are a *lot* of columns)
  
• break over multiple pages (because there are a lot of rows)
  
• have the entries in each cell wrap over multple lines (because there's often a lot of text in each entry)
  
• float, if possible (so that I don't have a half-empty page before the table starts).
  

Am pulling my hair out (what little is left of it) trying to grapple with the all the various tabular-derivative packages (longtable, supertabular, tabularx, tabulary, array... ), to figure out which one will work best for me, and how to massage it into doing what I want it to do.

And spending all my time doing this instead of actually *writing*.

GRARRRHHH!