This is a nice, though be warned technical, overview of how to perform quite extensive formatting work utilising the reference and template features of Pandoc so you minimise any time spent in Word:
With the addition of some Lua filters that support Word (like my index filter, a page break, and others), this provides a powerful way to build a DOCX without using Word.
In case it helps anyone else… I use pandoc-crossref to number equations but I couldn’t get it to move equation numbers all the way to the right margin when using pandoc to compile to docx. So I asked about this on the pandoc-crossref github page and some genius produced this macro that works perfectly. I wrote my book using this method, as the publisher demanded a final submission in docx.