All that was available for text editing was ed. (Surprise!)
I learned a lot about ed real fast.
Though this won't happen again, the lesson is "Learn the basics"
I learned a ton about unix command line utils via the "Unix Text Processing" book, not just troff. We had DWB troff later on, and it really was an education for me. I read in various lab data sets and created reports (with plots) in short order while others were repeatedly and tediously clicking away in Word or other.
I had no access at the time to fancy mathematical software tools. (recommended, especially FOSS)