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Just curious -- what's the usage profile for Office in the HN world? Where I work, we use Outlook (on macs), excel on occasion, powerpoint, and that's about it.

Just curious -- what's the usage profile for Office in the HN world? Where I work, we use Outlook (on macs), excel on occasion, powerpoint, and that's about it. Around 10 years ago or so, we'd draw up big honkin' requirements documents in Word and e-mail them around, but now we use Wikis & Stories (jira/VersionOne/etc...) for that, so use of Word has plummeted to about zero. Excel is used a fair bit for columnar data and the like, and frankly, I think it's not a bad product at all, though for personal use, I'd probably go with a google docs spreadsheet. And for simple cases, the google docs presentation software is an adequate powerpoint replacement. My general question/theory is that a lot of free/cheap/niche products have been nibbling at the edges of Office, and I'm wondering if/when a tipping point will occur, at which point it'll become totally irrelevant. On the other hand, perhaps if there's enough pushback against cloud services due to the NSA thing then standalone desktop apps will make a resurgence. "Office is Dead. Long live Office?"

pcunite 13y ago
We use LibreOffice and Outlook 2010.
- deleted 13y ago
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harrytuttle 13y ago
We're a 50/50 UNIX and Windows financial outfit. We use windows 7 + office on all desktops. UNIXy stuff is all on the end of PuTTY. From a general office work point of view, Excel is a piece of crap when it comes to anything past simple ledgers. Sure it starts out awesome but the moment it gets attached to an email, all hell breaks loose. SharePoint is the best fix for this but it's an ugly behemoth. Failing that, access + SQL Express is pretty good for most things but requires some knowledge past basic pointy clicky stuff. However, I uaed excel (and an HP48 calculator) for years as an engineer. In fact I built a massive toolkit with it. Fine for that though but not for data sharing which is what it inevitably degrades to in the wrong hands. Also our entire document authoring system is built on top off word and VSTO. Office cost is a non issue. Its cheap enough not to be noticed if considered across 5 years. Google docs doesn't cut it and we're not even likely to use it due to data sharing/privacy concerns and compliance issues. Plus google docs is hideously slow and the API is horrible. Office is not dead by a long shot despite the whinging from hipster startups pushing social crap. Oh we use JIRA too btw.

pcunite 13y ago

We use LibreOffice and Outlook 2010.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

harrytuttle 13y ago

We're a 50/50 UNIX and Windows financial outfit. We use windows 7 + office on all desktops. UNIXy stuff is all on the end of PuTTY. From a general office work point of view, Excel is a piece of crap when it comes to anything past simple ledgers. Sure it starts out awesome but the moment it gets attached to an email, all hell breaks loose. SharePoint is the best fix for this but it's an ugly behemoth. Failing that, access + SQL Express is pretty good for most things but requires some knowledge past basic pointy clicky stuff. However, I uaed excel (and an HP48 calculator) for years as an engineer. In fact I built a massive toolkit with it. Fine for that though but not for data sharing which is what it inevitably degrades to in the wrong hands. Also our entire document authoring system is built on top off word and VSTO. Office cost is a non issue. Its cheap enough not to be noticed if considered across 5 years. Google docs doesn't cut it and we're not even likely to use it due to data sharing/privacy concerns and compliance issues. Plus google docs is hideously slow and the API is horrible. Office is not dead by a long shot despite the whinging from hipster startups pushing social crap. Oh we use JIRA too btw.