Now I appreciate there might not be many who go with me on this, but I have formed the opinion over many years that packaged Office suites, and I am not referring to any particular brand but the concept as a whole, have on balance been very bad for business. I have two arguments for this view. One is that Office suites treat business information as documents when the concept of a document is a limitation of the original  medium - paper. This has led to a whole raft of increasingly complex technology to try and manage this outdated concept of documents. My second (and main) reason is that people try and use office suite applications, notably Excel and Access, to write line of business applications. These people (you and me mostly) are end users, not programmers. The technology they are using is not scalable nor is it manageable and because everybody has access to these tools even a small business can amass a plethora of "documents" with islands of critical business information in them completely inaccessible to the business as a whole. There is no shortage now of cost effective business centric application that are designed to manage business information in a structured way so that information is relevant and retrievable and many of these are very affordable and easy to get started with. So if you want to crunch some numbers on an occasional basis by all means use a spreadsheet. If you want to keep track of your customers, sales, stock, process or anything else in your business on a day to day basis stop, and give me a ring.

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