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Originally Posted by wakey
While I'm hardly Microsoft's biggest fan the bashing they are getting for office here is a little unfair.
First we have Word where we have people going "They would be better off learning a DTP".
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Hmmm, I'm not sure anyone said this as a general point. I said that
for what a lot of people use Word for, they'd be better off getting a DTP program. I already said Word was reasonably good for writing letters and non-rich reports. But because Word is all they have / know how to use, a lot of people end up struggling for hours in Word to create something they'd ultimately better off doing in another package.
The same can be said of Excel. Excel has a wonderfully low set up cost. There's no boring table setup, field definitions, primary keys or anything like that to think about before you start-off. Which is great, when you're trying to do back of the fag packet type calculations. But then people make sheets increasingly complex and there's a point reached when the effort spent maintaining the damn thing makes a database worthwhile. Excel also gets misused for all sorts of things though - I know a couple of surveyors who make cells very small and use cell-shading to do technical drawings. It kind of works, but one suspects they're missing out on some of the features that CAD programs give you.
Incidentally, I forgot my main gripe with the Office suite over the years (which fortunately seems to have improved in recent versions) : complete disregard for compatibility. While not supporting file formats from outside your company is irritatingly arrogant, not supporting your own formats is incredibly infuriating. The amount of time I've wasted trying to get round these problems since I started using Word 2 back in the day must run into solid days...
p.s. Incidentally this thread is an accidentally brilliant example of why the teaching model fails in most subjects (in terms of depth of understanding).