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Originally Posted by milo
As you get older these things matter more and more.
Has anyone tried google docs?
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Assuming this quesiton isn't rhetorical, I have (although not collabaratively, which I'm guessing is half the point). It's all just not quite good enough to use for "serious" use, although I'm not sure what use the office applications have anyway in the longer term.
Word seems best suited for letter writing and doesn't do much else that well -and for a lot of things people use it for people would be better off learning a DTP program in the long run. Powerpoint is responsible for a great deal of pain and suffering, and Access is rapidly approaching the point where I can see no legitimate market for it. It's too unwieldly for a regular user to use without understanding something about databases and if you're doing anything even approaching serious why wouldn't you use some sort of MySQL/PostgreSQL or even SQL Server Express variants?
So you've got Excel and Outlook. Outlook is genuinely useful in terms of email / calendar sharing which integrates reasonably well with itself and the windows shell. In time I can't see a web application not replacing it (even if it's just a better version of Windows Outlook Live). Increasingly I'm unsure whether email is a very good tool for a lot of business use.
Excel I both love and hate, I still use it daily for simple data manipulation tasks or quickly doing some sort of maths doodling for budgets and that sort of thing, but (a bit like Access) it seems to encourage unmanagable messes by reducing the barriers to entry to almost nothing. So you get quasi-systems being built by linking together dozens of excel files together, over different drives with absolutley no discipline in any naming conventions, data formats or...well anything really. It's not Excel's fault that users are shit, but it hardly helps by half-doing a bunch of things they should be doing elsewhere.