Although advertised as a WYSIWYG LaTeX-based word processor, it is actually a graphical user interface for editing LaTeX source files with the same ease-of-use of a word processor, while maintaining a screen view that resembles but is not identical to the eventual output that LaTeX produces.

[1] For instance, its display shows text wrapped to the width of the screen rather than to the eventual page width, and colored equations rather than the black-and-white rendering that LaTeX would normally produce.

[1] Because Scientific WorkPlace is based on LaTeX, it can be used to produce files in the house style of any scientific journal that also uses LaTeX,[1] and the software makes it easy to change the overall style of a document in a single operation.

It also announced that Scientific WorkPlace could not be made open source as the software relied on the computer algebra system MuPAD, a closed-source product.

Scientific Word 6.1 (the version without MuPAD) was made freely available for Windows and its source code will be posted to GitHub.