Why Bother with MS Office?

"How comfortable do you feel with MS Office?" - considering the fact that MS still (after so many years) offers a single COM interop way to work with word/excel... even with the last COM improvements VS2010 brought in... it's still a pain, mainly due to amount of work (tricks, undocumented ways, etc.) needed to make things work fast (or work at all). But yes, a few years ago it was a pain beyond measure - to learn how to use all that effectively %) Now it's simply, just, bad :) "Do you agree that end-users anoint..." - they do. Just google it :) The key word here, probably, is "infantilism", hmm... the next wiki link leads to "Regression (psychology)" which, imo, somewhere close to explanation of such behavior - when they turn on "dumb" mode panicking about any elementary problem and run to you asking you to, so to say "save" them, showing eternal gratitude (if you can help them) OR you have to explain that the thing they want is hard to make in a given time because their problem will require solution with implementation of some sort of artificial intelligence... Thanks to the i-nets nowadays we can find answers even to a complex problems so there is virtually no situations when I can say "I can't solve your problem", but "Sorry I don't have the time atm" (until you compensate my time with a good cold beer :P) "And last, do you think it is worth" - it's worth it. You just can't ignore it, no matter how much you want to :) Too much ppl use it already...

Nice start to get the discussion going Dave.