I find it interesting that office suites are often dubbed "productivity suites" by vendors. Of course, they are "productive" software compared to say.. Solitaire, but are they really "productive" in the absolute meaning of the word?

Claim
By making office software easy to use, the user doesn't have to waste time on learning how to use the software, because it's so intuitive that any idiot can use it. And thus you're more productive.

Counterclaim
If it's easy enough for idiots to use, won't idiots use it? Or rather, to be a little more accurate, won't users use it at the intellectual level of an idiot? How, and why, would they rise above that level if it's all they need to get by?

As someone who thinks about software, writes software, uses software, and comments on software, it pains me to see how some people use software. It really makes me sad.

The whole office suite concept was never my cup of tea. I used it because it seemed to be "the way" to write documents, but deep down it always bugged me. Then I got into using latex for document creation and it's like a whole new world opened up. Structured documents, what an amazing thing. It took me a while to get used to the latex way, but that's because I had to de-program myself of those bad habits. Now I wouldn't use an office suite for anything ever.

Here's how Ms Office works. You sit down at the desk, your friend points to the keyboard, you press a key, the character comes up on the screen. This is pretty much the intellectual level at which most people use Ms Word. Of course, the software has other features, it has functions to get things done faster/better/nicer. But most people, and that's probably 90% or more, don't know/don't care/wouldn't care about them. As long as they can just plug along.

I gave a presentation about two weeks ago, I had 20 slides, and it took me a couple of hours to write the presentation in latex. I didn't have to re-learn anything, because latex is the same whatever document you're writing. The process was entirely smooth, as it wasn't my first time, so I knew what I was doing. I've done maybe three presentations in latex, and by the third one I felt completely comfortable.

Last week my group was obliged to give another presentation, and this time another guy did the honors. But we all wrote it together, so he manned the computer while we discussed the content. A computer screen tends to draw your eyes in, but I was fighting the urge, I really couldn't stand it. First the guy designed a little logo in Ms Paint, which he included into the slides. When I said the logo could use a slight modification, he had to change the image on every slide one by one. Then he thought it would be nice to have a little index of the presentation on the side of the slides, which was a nice touch. So everytime he added a slide or renamed another, he would update the index on every single slide manually. Then it was the layout.. when he combined images with text, or even just when adding lists of points, often the layout wouldn't fit, there would be a forced linebreak, or something would clash, so he had to reposition the text fields. He spent more time doing these updates than actually adding content, in the form of keywords mostly. I felt like chewing my arm off watching this.

Yes, Ms Powerpoint might just have templates. And it might just have indexing. But what's the difference when noone uses this? It was certainly not the first time the guy made a presentation, I'm sure he'd done plenty of them before. But this was his level of usage. Because Powerpoint encourages you to act an idiot, that's what people become.

Needless to say, this has very little to do with productivity. Busy work, that's what this is. It's the computer equivalent of digging holes and then filling them. The general level of document creation is just appalling to me. That Ms Office be the standard for exchanging documents, and seeing how bad they look and how incredibly messy the whole process is, it's astounding.