If you don't care about font and style, yes. But if the "markup" is high relative to the character count, pens win. This is also a pronounced issue in informat

If you don't care about font and style, yes. But if the "markup" is high relative to the character count, pens win. This is also a pronounced issue in information graphics -- the off-the-shelf stuff in Excel etc is quite limited; you can do a custom visual a lot better, easier, with a custom drawing, what is impossible or ungainly in a "smart" diagramming program.