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What do you do with an office suite?

3 points by tsuraan ↗ HN
Choice in office suite (iLife vs. MS Office vs. OOo) seems to be something that comes up pretty often. It's something that confuses me though, as I haven't used a text editor fancier than vim since high school, and what I create boils down to pretty much source code/documentation, email, and forum postings. What do people (especially programmers) do with office suites? Are presentations the big draw? Organizing data in a tabular format? Writing letters to people?

5 comments

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yan
I use office suites to open what other people send me.
tsuraan
Yeah, I also keep a copy of OOo for that particular case. Logically, there must be some people who actually use office suites to create documents though...
DanielStraight
I use office programs for anything where pagination is important (ruling out HTML, at least without complication) and formatting or embedding of pictures/charts is desired (ruling out text files).

Text files also fall short when displaying non-trivial equations.

dmlorenzetti
Almost all my office suite use involves interacting with project sponsors. This runs from writing proposals (internal finance people want Excel spreadsheets, and sponsors often require Word format) to presenting results at review meetings (PowerPoint is the norm).

The consistent theme here is that MS formats are implicitly required. For that, I tried OpenOffice for a while, but just ran into too many minor glitches.

For more formal writeups of results, I get to use LaTeX.

Note we almost never produce plots using Excel; we tend to use R, and embed a resulting PDF in the Word or PowerPoint document.

pasbesoin
Excel can be very useful for cleaning up dirty data, once you are familiar with it. I don't know whether Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), or whatever has replaced it, currently supports regular expressions, but back around 1999 or 2000 defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (WSH) provided that functionality. Very useful for making and extracting pattern matches; in my case, I needed to identify particular codes within a large, freeform text field that multiple people at multiple facilities filled in each in their own fashion.

Excel does have plenty of quirks, which can be rather aggravating. My un-favorite: Applying a text formatting function to something like 2334d2 resulted in 233400 rather than 2334D2 because the formatting function was hard-wired to recognize "d[number]" as specifying an exponent even when your formula or code was applying text formatting. (Which interpretation apparently, as I was eventually told by someone with experience in the area, comes from Fortran. The same thing happened with "e"; at least "e[exponent]" I was familiar with; "d..." caught me by surprise).

So, some bozo or bozos send you a lot of semi-regular data. You shove it into Excel, where some of your cleanup is automated, and Excel makes it very quick to navigate around and manually fix the rest.

BTW, I've not used OO Calc for anything significant, but I continue to read here and there that for serious spreadsheeting, it still cannot compare to Excel.