Does anybody use Microsoft Office?

Ask a firm called Softwatch and they will wiggle their hand in that kinda, sorta, ish way. They've been esearching it and conclude in part that:

When examining the data, a clear observation is that the overall usage of the different applications is relatively low. This is extremely true with PowerPoint which is hardly being used. From our engagements with customers we have found that in most cases, the usage levels were far below what they perceived before using the service. As a general statement, these results indicate that at least 80% of Office users can move to alternative cloud based solutions.
The fact that 68% of the users don't use any application heavily lead to a conclusion that this population can be moved to alternative cloud based solutions rather easily and their Office licenses should be decommissioned. Specifically, the Inactive and Viewers populations which accounts for 29% in Excel and Word and 70%(!) in PowerPoint. It’s safe to say that these populations are the low hanging fruit for that matter.

You can already tell from reading this that Softwatch was looking at how people can be moved from the expensive Microsoft Office to alternatives such as Google's cloud ones like Google Docs.

Which is all well and good, even if one can lament the idea of any research ever being done for the hell of it instead of with an interest like this. And the results are unsurprisingly surprising: maybe companies don't realise how little their staff use the various parts of Microsoft Office, but you know that PowerPoint makes you ill.

So if you are somewhere that this data could get you where you want to go, ie away from Office, you go read how whole thing and make yourself some notes. Except, I think this is the killer fact from the report's research methodology:

The analysis is done on the three main components of the MS Office package: PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Please note that Outlook, which is commonly used by all users, is excluded from the user segmentation analysis.

If you didn't exclude Outlook, then, you'd have got a different story. To my mind, that means you got a different story.

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