I'm not a fan of any component in particular, well apart from one surprise, so I thought I'd have a rant: Word - separation of content and layout is an absolut

I'm not a fan of any component in particular, well apart from one surprise, so I thought I'd have a rant: Word - separation of content and layout is an absolute bugger to manage. Hard to share and version documents. It's actually hard to write a letter or lengthy document with it if you don't have a template to hand. Excel - utter dog if you need to use it for anything more than trivial and all it does is "ugly" and "puke". most problems are solvable in a cleaner way with a small script (python wins for me). Some crazy organisations use it as a database and email changes around to each other via outlook, leading to sync hell. Sometimes, that is the entire company's business floating around in emails. It's just the wrong tool for most jobs it is given. I usually get the job of replacing these turds. Publisher - I've seen it used for paper aeroplanes only so I can't comment on its usefulness, or perhaps that is its primary use. Powerpoint - Many an hour I've toiled in front of the output of this program. HOWEVER, it's far better than most of the awful hour long diatribes you have to sit through with whinging monotonic voices in the form of streaming (or should that be steaming) videos. 2 minutes content in an HOUR of my life and they don't skip properly. At least I can scan through a powerpoint in a couple of minutes. InfoPath - never used it. It goes near Sharepoint so it's off limit for me. Access - Access is actually really damn good, but only if you use ADB projects attached to a SQL Server database. If you use local MDB files and Jet, it's another Excel. Outlook - It's better than Lotus Notes. That's the only credit I can give it. Office 365 is the above products, done half as well, with a third of the performance, without the old fashioned data security of being able to get it all back easily from a USB stick.