Thinking About Microsoft

Beating up on Microsoft and picking them apart is nothing new. It's a religious right on any given day. I am primarily a Mac user, so I'm not one to drink the "Microsoft Kool-Aid." But there are some important to remind and encourage people about with certain products. Specifically, I'm talking about Microsoft Office.

MS Office is something that Microsoft does very right, especially Excel. I like to think of Excel as the "Swiss Army" knife of software. The application in and of itself is awesome. You can easily use it in a variety of ways. The obvious it calculations and formulas. The other is as a flat file database. You can do some really cool stuff that on the surface seems simple, but in reality can be a little mind bending. I can't tell you how many times I've used it to create and manage and been data through CSV files. I love that stuff. We don't talk enough about it.

As a matter of fact, people in tech world are famous for talking about how deep Adobe Photoshop is. But the truth be told, so is Excel. If you want to go in that direction, it's impressively deep in scope. I've seen some mind-blowing stuff that would meet the needs and demands of any serious business person. Unfortunately most people only use about 10 of the available feature set.

Word is Word. I've had friends write anything form novels to training manuals to automated forms. There are some interesting tools inside. You can do a heck of a lot more than design certificates with MS Word. The forms tool is pretty interesting to play with.

I'm not going to go into each application, but by now you have a feel for the direction I'm going in and what I'm talking about. The bottom line it that MS Office is something that the boys and girls at Redmond got right. If you look into it, you can find some cool stuff. Apple has a famous phrase. "Think Different." It would not be a false thing to apply towards the suite.

Let us know your thoughts. Happy computing!

Jaye