I'm not quite sure. Within my work team, Word is only used occasionally, specifically for anything document related. Excel, on the other hand, is used all the time from typical number crunching to keeping track of tasks (despite how much I despise using it for the latter). I also imagine that small businesses, like restaurants, don't require Word very often, but a lot of them use Excel for finances, inventory, etc.
In regards to PowerPoint, I imagine it lags pretty far behind in usage compared to both Excel and Word. Not many people are making presentations in the grand scheme of things. My intuition says that it's mostly upper management and maybe a single person in a group using PowerPoint "often".
My experiences in the business world is Word has been on a sharp decline for a long time. Excel is more likely to be used as Word. It’s very common to see a spreadsheet with no math and no tabular data but it’s print formatted.
For me at least, I try to avoid Word because it is so slow and cumbersome compared to notepad or notepad++ for the purpose of writing notes. It seems like most of my word processing is for my eyes only.
I’ll have to give pages a try. I think perhaps I favor the earlier versions of office products because I learned on them, they’re faster, and they weren’t as a service.
I’ll go for latex if something has to be published and certainly use power point a bit but am always on the lookout for new approaches. It’s great that power point can pull/receive graph data.
A word processor like Word is really aimed at larger, more complex documents with formatting.
Notes are usually smaller with simpler structure and formatting. With notes, it helps of the app gives you a way to organize the notes. This is really a different use case.
Powerpoint is powerful once you get deep into it. I know people who make some crazy visuals using powerpoint and you would thing it was done with some adobe software.
Not generally. Big firms it would be email 1st with browser for most line of business apps , excel close second, third PowerPoint, with Word behind by some distance and mainly for reading, rather then writing so Acrobat is high on the list as well.
Most of the excel workbooks would be lists and trackers of various kinds, many just (big) tables without any formulae at all.
Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though? You can do spreadsheets in Word and Outlook, have styled text in your Excel document, add animations to your titles in Word, etc.
At this point they can just as wel get rid of the different GUIs facade and instead implement some contextual interaction model (and hopefully they'll include an API so we can generate these documents programatically and don't have to deal with this nth clippy generation :) )
> Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though?
Yes, there absolutely is.
You can create a document with styled text in Excel instead of Word, just as you can edit a photo in Paint instead of Photoshop. You can do it, but the two tools have dramatically different capabilities.
It's important to think about developing for use-cases otherwise we will end up with overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people.
> overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people
This is exactly what I believe the current state of the MS Office applications to be.
The interface and/or implementation isn't always ideal for the purpose you would generally use a specific app for, but the functionality is there.
> dramatically different capabilities
Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint.
> Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint.
This is effectively opening a reduced version of excel in a very limited way, primarily for embedding one document in another and allowing limited editing. You don’t get the full functionality of the other application.
I can see why I would want to change the axis on a graph even after I have pasted it into my email, but why would I want one app to be both my spreadsheet and my email inbox?
Are you a user of office suite? I spend about 70% of my work life between excel, PowerPoint and Word and have never once wanted them to be one app, but quite often have wanted better integration.
Perversely you /can/ use simple formulas (sum,average, etc) natively in Word tables. Thankfully I’ve never come across a document where someone was mad enough to do anything much with it.
