47d4bd0f@news.povray.org...

> It's not a question of "so many features *I* don't need to use", but "so
> many features that *most* users don't need to use".

But this is where the fallacy is! Unless you know "most people" your 
knowledge of what they use is limited to your acquaintances, which may or 
may not be representative. Obviously noone uses every available feature, but 
the point is that given the sheer number of Excel users, all the features 
end up being used by a significant number of people who are dependent of 
them for their work. Possibly, only a limited percentage of Excel users use 
the solver or VBA for instance, but those who do *** really *** use them, 
because they're fundamental business tools.

> I don't know that 1-2-3 would be completely useless by modern standards -
> I think a lot of tasks that people use Excel for these days aren't much
> beyond what 1-2-3 was capable of.

And 1-2-3, in spite of having a large user base and being a fantatisc 
product in its own right, was killed by Excel. People switched in droves, 
for very good reasons. After Excel came, we looked at our crummy 1-2-3 
graphs and reports, at our painfully obfuscated 1-2-3 macros, and switched. 
Overnight.

You're vastly underestimating users and what regular people - and 
particularly business users - are able to do with office software and what 
they expect from their spreadsheets, word processors, databases etc. I 
understand that there's this curious myth about business users being 
clueless drones who just write a letter once in a while and occasionally use 
a spreadsheet to make an addition and then put the result in Powerpoint 
using Comic Sans, but that's just that, a myth.

G.


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