Re: Microsoft good press over Longhorn

[Tom <tb.31020.nospam@comcast.net>]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 08:34:38AM +1100, Joyce, Matthew wrote:
> Excel is pretty neat and I wish there was a DOC Edit clone for linux.

When I worked at Microsoft there was some discussion: far and away the 
most common use-case for Excel is entering a few rows and columns of 
data and making a chart.  But nobody uses Microsoft tools like Microsoft 
itself: you should have *seen* some of the fancy spreadsheets the 
GM-level staff put together.

I have this belief that 90% of jobs are unnecessary; they are just 
something for people to do all day because otherwise they'd go out and 
burn cars.  Most of the things I have to do with Excel and Word fall in 
that category.

For small datasets, I finally realized plaintext files and simple tools 
like gnuplot are more flexible than Excel.