Businesses using Microsoft Office could save money by switching to something else, says a company that (surprise!) helps businesses dump Microsoft’s apps suite and move to Google’s. My reaction: Extremely cautious.

Application analytics company Softwatch says its monitoring of nearly 150,000 users finds Microsoft Office is used, on average, for only 48 minutes-a-day, time overwhelmingly spent in Outlook. Excel gets more of a workout (8 minutes) than Word (5 minutes) and half of potential users never touch PowerPoint.

“From our engagements with customers we have found that in most cases, the usage levels were far below what they perceived before using the service,” Softwatch said in its report. “As a general statement, these results indicate that at least 80 percent of Office users can move to alternative cloud based solutions.”

Yes, it’s the familiar 80/20 rule, applied to users. Only 20 percent of Office users spend enough time in the apps to justify the investment. That implies that the other 80 percent could switch to something less expensive without  noticing what’s missing.

My guess is that probably half the people who have Office on their systems could have it removed, go to web-based Microsoft Outlook for their email and hardly notice the change. Many business documents, such as memos and reports, are now created as email messages, so Word processors are not used quite like the typewriters they replaced.

Combining Word and Outlook usage might give a better idea of how important words are to a business, compared to numbers crunched in Excel.

Didn’t work for me

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I’ve tried switching to Google apps and have found, the hard way, that Google’s word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities don’t meet my needs. File compatibility is also still not perfect, especially for complex Word documents.

The integration between Google’s mail and calendar could be better, and Google’s advanced features are not enough to replace Outlook for many users. Though for those not using Outlook calendaring, however, Google  Mail should be fine.

People who do long and/or complex documents should not use Google apps. Granted, Word leaves a lot to be desired where formatting is concerned (Hint: Take the time to create the style sheets you need in advance), but I found it impossible to get the complex documents I wanted out of Google’s word processor because it simply lacked the functionality I require.

Can you make the change?

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The big reason to stay with Microsoft Office is that everyone already knows how to use it and, more importantly, everyone already uses it. There have been several “Microsoft killers” over the years, Google among them, but none have seriously threatened Microsoft’s flagship.

If you are going to run Office in one part of your organization, I think it is important for everyone to remain in the Microsoft ecosystem, especially when Exchange servers are involved.

I don’t believe most “knowledge workers” can or should be weaned away from Office. If you need to produce and share complex documents and spreadsheets or produce eye-catching presentations, Office is clearly the best choice.

However, many organizations have large numbers of users for whom word processing means little more than writing a memo and most of that actually happens in an email program or web browser. Those users are well-served by either web-based Outlook or Google Mail. They may also find the web-hosted Office apps quite satisfactory.

If your organization doesn’t require robust word processing, spreadsheet capabilities, by all means look at Google as an Office replacement. For those with really limited needs, an all-Google solution would work great.

Cut a better deal

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Rather than switching, Microsoft customers should look at all the purchase options — including individual copies of Word or Excel for some users. Microsoft has a zillion purchasing options and many companies can tune their Office investment more to their actual usage of the product.

If you need specific usage information for Office and other apps at your company, Softwatch offers analytics as a service.

A Story About PowerPoint

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As an aside, Microsoft Office was created, more than partly, to generate sales of PowerPoint, essentially by throwing it in for very low cost. After Microsoft did this, WordPerfect followed and an office suite became how most customers purchase desktop productivity apps, to this day.

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