One of the "crimes" (he types hyperbolically) of Microsoft Office is that is basically sucked all the air out of the room for anything else in the non-graphical artist office productivity area that wasn't Office or a pretty direct knock-off.
The spreadsheet model is a good example (even if Excel is probably the best thing in Microsoft Office. But it also means that if you can't make Word do a good enough job for desktop publishing you generally have to go to InDesign which is probably way overkill if yoiu're not a publishing professional.
To be honest i saw a teacher in high school working on his own textbook)the second revision of an already published textbook) in word and while it had the classic wysiwyg experience, it was typographically okay, almost ready to be printed.
Word, or even something like Google Docs which lacks some features in areas like Section numbering, isn't terrible. I published a book using Google Docs and basically decided anything it couldn't do I didn't need or could handle manually. But, if I were actually come up with a wish list for a low-end publishing platform it would probably look a bit different than Word.
I’d believe it if you count every random plot people make as “design.”
It blows my mind how much people do in excel. On one hand it’s pretty cool how much it can do but you end up with these monster spreadsheets that should really be their own program of some sorts.
One example I think about a lot (because I use the end product a lot) is Fangraphs’ ZiPs model that predicts baseball stats for upcoming seasons. It’s 20 years old and, from what I’ve been told, a massive Excel book with some VB. The creator was a stats major but they didn’t do much programming in his curriculum so Excel was the option he was most comfortable / productive with. Yet, he’s doing a massive analysis over every player in the league using decades of historical data. The thought of doing that in Excel makes my stomach churn but if it works for him then I guess it’s good enough!
Excel is really amazing for doing adhoc type reporting/analysis. I think there is still a gap in the market for a product between Excel and a full blown app with a sql database. Excel falters at larger data sets but I don't find the existing tools in the marketplace very compelling. I always thought there was a lot more momentum in the past with Visual Basic and MS Access. You could build some very interesting tooling that bridge the gap between an Excel workbook and a full blown custom application.
These days I hear a lot about Tableau but the few times I have tried it out I was not a fan. It definitely handles larger datasets that Excel cannot but everything feels hidden behind menus that are unintuitive. In fairness I have never spent the proper time to sit down with it and maybe this kind of workflow works really well for business users.
The spreadsheet model is a good example (even if Excel is probably the best thing in Microsoft Office. But it also means that if you can't make Word do a good enough job for desktop publishing you generally have to go to InDesign which is probably way overkill if yoiu're not a publishing professional.