Quote from: BigSoy

Quote from: Serious

Very few people use spreadsheets.

Again, this is utter rubbish. Money makes the world go around, and Excel is surprisingly good at counting...

Didnt say excell wasnt good at counting but it comes as part of the package, virtually everyone will use the word processor, fewer use the database and fewest use the spreadsheet. You would be shocked at how many users get the full suite when they only use the wordprocessor for a few letters. Im not just talking about Dixons/PCworld customers here, loads of big businesses buy the suite and roll it out on every desktop they have.

Usually there are better options for doing accountancy. Perhaps you should go and learn about business rather than pretending?

Quote from: red

i use excel a hell of a lot. budgeting, tabulating results for reports etc... very powerfull tool imo.

Are you typical of users though? I doubt it.

Quote

i prefer office because everything else is alien to me.

Exctly what I have been trying to point out, once they have you then you aent going anywhere else.

Who mentioned accountancy? I said money, which isnt necessarily the same thing. I deal with prices, bills, hours, plus a load of other stuff that gets counted.

The point is I am a quite typical user, I work on a site with 150 people from my company they almost all use Excel in their day-to-day jobs, similiarly for the previous site, with closer to 3,000 people, and similarly for the company as a whole, closer to 10,000 people. And were hardly a super-specialised company.

If you want to get personal why dont YOU find out what working in a modern office is like, seems you manage to type well enough on the forums, considering as far as I know you off on long-term sick?  

EDIT: Id also love to know where you got your stat that more people use Access than Excel from, cos Id guess its big fluffy place in the sky called clouds.

Almost every document I write is going to have sections, styles, tables, complicated headers and footers, ToCs, embedded files, images, diagrams, and other kinds of crap

me too, thats the primary reason why I stopped using Word. Maybe it can be convinced to do all those things consistently and without messing up every half hour, but I dont have time to learn how.

Latex plus the Lyx frontend does it all, fully automatic numbering of everything that actually works, its free, it runs under Linux or Windows, outputs PDF or PS if you ask it to and best of all, not a paperclip in sight.

At best Word is as good as Lyx, and thats with the rather large assumption that Word is actually going to do what you tell it to on a given day. I dont see why I should pay good money for something which is "as good" when I can have all the functionality I could ever want for free.

Excel is the only M$ program I would consider paying for, and the OO spreadsheet has now advanced to the level where it does everything I want at home. In an office environment it would probably be different, but for me the improvement isnt even worth the shame of buying it, let alone the price tag.

Heh, Lyx is a fine alternative for all of those things - unforunately as a relatively small open-source project as far as Im aware, its unlikely to replace the supportability of MS in the office environment.

quite true, and a right pain in my behind because I hate being forced to use Word at work

If I really want consistency, I might just use straight laTex, but then eventually the consistency usually drives me up the wall when I want to tweak!

lol yeah I suppose that can be an issue at times.

A lot of scientific journals still require submissions in Latex so Ill probably have to learn how to do it by hand at some point. Word isnt the standard quite everywhere.

Quote from: M3ta7h3ad

Also Serious, your making a huge assumption that the typical office user will not use any of the features.

Whos to say that you are representative of the typical MS office user?

If you had read everything I have said then it would be obvious that Im not, but then again neither is anyone else on here. People just tend to assume because they use something everyone else will which just isnt the case.

[/quote]

How do you know whether anyone here is a typical user or not? You make it sound as if the typical user has two heads and 3 foot pan-handle growing out of their face.

Typical or not, I dont assume anything about what the people I work with use their office suite for, because I know the documentation standards we have to adhere to, on a global basis, require at a bare minimum Word and Excel. Im also pretty convinced that most big companies have similar requirements, and therefore will use the tools in the same way

You make it sound as if the typical user has two heads and 3 foot pan-handle growing out of their face.

you mean you havent?

Damn, alone again

Most of the crap can be done by my ancient copy of Wordstar 2 TBH so nothing new there at all.

Maybe all the documents you produce are basic enough to pass for Wordstar 2 products, however what BigSoy said is going to be true of even school children:

Almost every document I write is going to have sections, styles, tables, complicated headers and footers, ToCs, embedded files, images, diagrams, and other kinds of crap

and in conclusion....

If you bought Microsoft Office just for a spellchecker your more of a chump than you let on.

It isnt often I actaully laugh out loud when I lol (so to speak) however in this particular instance its a real LOL !

Slightly off-topic, but is the orignal point Is Office 2007 worth it?

If so, I havent seen such a heated debate on here for a while, keep it up chaps!  :mrgreen: