Poll: What's your least favorite component of MS Office
Inspired by: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2717361
That said, I'm still not fond of the Ribbon UI in general. Maybe it's just me, but I find text in a column easier to scan than a bunch of icons, most of which are hidden.
Eventually I found it. Not in a context menu anywhere, but somewhere in the ribbons, through an obscure "current selection" area, a place I would have never looked at on my own.
On the other hand I was pretty impressed by the change tracking feature in Word. Much more understandable for non-geeks than traditional source control.
Good times.
* Easy creation of [FORM [SUB-FORM]] constructs
* Easy linking of dropdowns and lists from table or view data
* Simple GUI for creating forms
* Intuitive data binding behavior
* "Wizards" for common tasks that require guidance
What sucked about Access was the back-end. Using an Access database over a network meant sucking huge chunks of data over the wire. I built a few Access databases with a SQL back-end, and use over a network wasn't all that bad.
And yes, I'm aware that my views are probably wildly unpopular with developers, but I live in a world with business users. Anyone want to venture a guess at the number of business users out there who are literally building databases out of Excel spreadsheets? I know plenty of people for whom a SQL "LEFT INNER JOIN" would make no sense, but they're perfectly happy using an Excel workbook full of tabs and VLOOKUP() calls all over the place.
ZoHo has a product called Creator that comes close, but when I tried it (a year or two ago), the "relational" aspect was missing. The master->child data relationship exists everywhere in business processes, but there are no user facing tools (except Access and Excel) that put the power of relational data in the hands of users.
I miss what Access could be.
Related: Rosy retrospection http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
Word - separation of content and layout is an absolute bugger to manage. Hard to share and version documents. It's actually hard to write a letter or lengthy document with it if you don't have a template to hand.
Excel - utter dog if you need to use it for anything more than trivial and all it does is "ugly" and "puke". most problems are solvable in a cleaner way with a small script (python wins for me). Some crazy organisations use it as a database and email changes around to each other via outlook, leading to sync hell. Sometimes, that is the entire company's business floating around in emails. It's just the wrong tool for most jobs it is given. I usually get the job of replacing these turds.
Publisher - I've seen it used for paper aeroplanes only so I can't comment on its usefulness, or perhaps that is its primary use.
Powerpoint - Many an hour I've toiled in front of the output of this program. HOWEVER, it's far better than most of the awful hour long diatribes you have to sit through with whinging monotonic voices in the form of streaming (or should that be steaming) videos. 2 minutes content in an HOUR of my life and they don't skip properly. At least I can scan through a powerpoint in a couple of minutes.
InfoPath - never used it. It goes near Sharepoint so it's off limit for me.
Access - Access is actually really damn good, but only if you use ADB projects attached to a SQL Server database. If you use local MDB files and Jet, it's another Excel.
Outlook - It's better than Lotus Notes. That's the only credit I can give it.
Office 365 is the above products, done half as well, with a third of the performance, without the old fashioned data security of being able to get it all back easily from a USB stick.
This is the result of the WYSIWYG generation. "Ancient" systems like TeX (and even WordPerfect) did much better with this and got better looking output on balance, but with our newfangled "OOhh! Pretty!" systems, everyone thinks they're a designer. So, we get systems like Word.