47d56173$1@news.povray.org...
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:25:45 +0100, Gilles Tran wrote:

> Well, not for me they're not.  Not for most of the people I work with -
> and I work in an office that consists of both technical and non-technical
> people.  Most of my closest coworkers are not technical, but quite a few
> are.  It used to be the other way around - I almost never dealt with the
> non-technical people, being an IT person myself.

Well I'm in the feed industry, not an IT person and not knowing IT people 
(except to hire them...). I guess that folks who feed cows and pigs are 
special then ;) Not really kidding: it's an industry based on operational 
research, so crunching numbers is a normal way of life. Lots of these people 
actually live within Excel. Right now, we got a bunch of them downstairs 
being lectured about the joys of linear programming (and linear programming 
modelisation) and exporting data to and from MS Office and automating the 
whole processes. And they sure do know what they need.

> applications for the first Windows platform.  Everyone "had to have" the
> Windows environment for some reason, and WordPerfect and Lotus were late
> to the game *because* Microsoft didn't release the APIs externally (and
> changed some of them between beta and RTM, just to *really* fsck-up their
> competition).
> This is not conjecture on my part - this is well-documented fact.

And it doesn't change the fact that Lotus had become obsolete and that Excel 
was a superior product with features that people had been expecting (and not 
getting) from Lotus for a while. Here, Excel was the reason we switched 
gradually to Windows, not the other way round. It's not like Windows was 
actually useful for anything else back then. (I did play tic-tac-toe with 
Windows 1 though).

> department.  I've seen accounting spreadsheets that would make most
> people's heads hurt for days on end.

Oh I've seen that too, no arguing necessary. And the Comic Sans 
presentations too.

G.

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