[matwood]

I'm going to agree with you 100%. Word and PPT do not matter if the format changes a bit or whatnot (this already happens between different versions of Office). If you need to create a document that keeps perfect formatting, then you need to output in something like PDF.

Excel is a completely different beast that has so many features it's very hard to cover them all for all users. A big one we use is using Excel as the front end to MSAS. Normally we would have had to design some user/reporting interface, but instead we were able to use Excel pivot tables to access the data directly on the server. Since all of the analysts are already familiar with Excel and its pivot table interface I just had to show them how to to point it to our MSAS instance.