[Bush2000]

Does Excel make the average user more productive? I don't think so, and I use Excel extensively at work and OpenOffice extensively at home.

That's one of the nice things about MS: You can purchase the individual applications you need (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) or you can buy the suites...

[antiRepublicrat]

You can purchase the individual applications you need (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) or you can buy the suites

Allowing unbundling of the suites at a decent cost was one of the unprecedented offers Microsoft made to try to win the Munich contract. Normally it's too expensive to buy just the applications you need across thousands of seats.