You’ll be a lot happier with InDesign for those purposes than, say, Word. I’d say that ID is more of a high end program for professionals, and is much more geared towards users who need to publish actual books rather than office reports or something. ID handles footers, TOC formatting, footnotes, drop caps, captions, etc very well.
I also find the ability to position things, handle fonts, and apply styling is 1000 times more painless in InDesign. It’s got some really useful features to handle large documents… for example, if you made a book where every chapter header is black Times New Roman, but you wanted to change them all to Requiem Italic, color them blue, and make them 2 sizes smaller, you could do it with a single search-and-replace or by redefining a grep style.
But then again, you’re asking on a site for InDesign fans, so what did you figure people would say? “Nah, it’s crappy, I mostly use Publisher for that stuff” :)
.
