Wow, that's a tough one on many fronts. As someone mentioned, the change in UI when Office 2007 came out was more painful than most care to admit. I personally went from feeling like a power user to a complete moron crying like a little baby. Horrible move on Microsoft's part. Not sure we've gained anything at all. But, now years later, it is what it is.

Then there's "Office as a Tool", which, to me, means mostly Excel.

Another big huge part of the MS ecosystem, at least for us, is the fact that you can automate and create custom solutions using VBA (or Python). I don't have any data to indicate this is commonplace but I'd like to think large companies have such things as highly customize Excel spreadsheets doing all kinds of interesting stuff.

As an example, we developed an Excel application to design Helmholtz resonators for acoustic treatment of mixing rooms and high-end movie projection rooms. It would calculate various room resonant modes, use a database of materials to determine damping across the desired frequency ranges and spit out Helmholtz resonator build parameters for low to mid-range acoustical treatment. It worked like a charm and could be installed and loaded by anyone with Excel.

Yet another tool was used to simulate FIFO timing for a frame buffer to be implemented within a Xilinx FPGA for an image processing application. It would allow faster verification of various parameters than running a Verilog simulation and spit out a bunch of Verilog code based on results.

Another tool was a really neat state machine generator for embedded systems using multi-line text LCD displays for a menu. You could build the menu in Excel, click a few buttons and out would come a full state machine with callback function definitions for full navigation through a menu as well as dealing with screens where user adjustments could happen (think "volume up", "volume down", "set temperature", etc.). If you've ever written and maintained LCD menu code for an embedded system you can appreciate the advantage of entering your menu into Excel and having cut-and-paste C code you can paste into your Keil compiler (or whatever).

Another tool was created to help design Power Distribution Systems (PDS) for high speed boards. In designing electronic boards operating at high frequencies PDS integrity is a big deal. We wrote an Excel tool that encoded all of the required knowledge (for our work) and allowed the engineer to explore various PDS integrity topologies and configurations with graphs, etc.

A tool I really like helped with the time consuming task of creating land and schematic patterns for Altium Designer. Rolling-up to your desk to create schematic symbols and a pcb pattern for an FPGA with 1152 pins is, well, a nightmare. And it is worst as a design is modified during development stages. Our tool was able to take a process that consumed 10 to 12 hours and shrink it down to 30 to 45 minutes.

We created a Powerpoint presentation that made heavy use of VBA to simulate a full control panel, complete with a dot matrix LCD display. This tool was used to both demonstrate functionality and train people on the system without much more than a laptop running powerpoint.

I have a lot more examples like that. The point being that, in the right hands, these Office tools are far more useful and capable than out of the box.

And then there's the financial side. Google tools cost money. We upgraded our Office 2003 licenses to Office 2007 and we've been using that version ever since. There's nothing in the new versions that is compelling enough to upgrade. This means that the cost of Office becomes insignificant and non-recurring, which can be very important.

Note to Microsoft: Want to get me (and others) to upgrade again? Make Python a NATIVE alternative to VBA.