IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance I completely agree. Excel is the thing that keeps me tied to Windows (and no, the Mac versi

IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance I completely agree. Excel is the thing that keeps me tied to Windows (and no, the Mac version of Excel isn't the same). It is by far the best software I have used for small to medium complexity data analysis (at some point you have to pull out the really heavy lifting number crunching tools, but they have even less open source competition), and it is the only software I have used that meets most of my needs and is also approachable to relative beginners.