[MattGaiser]

> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user.

But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?

I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.

[II2II]

In the context of this article, "average user" and "power user" does not have much meaning. Take the copy-paste example. One group of users is going to find paste-with-formatting more practical while another group of users is going to find paste-without-formatting more useful. The distinction has more to do with the task at hand than the ability of the user. Consider someone working withing a document or within a set of documents for a project. Losing formatting means they will have to go back to recreate it. Now consider someone pulling information from various sources. Maintaining formatting means a loss of consistency in the destination, so it is less desirable.

As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).

[Jenk]

Anecdotal and a complete digression from your point - I consider myself a poweruser of excel/word/etc and I loathe the online variants in O365. There's quite a few features missing in both that require me to use the offline variant that are both supported in GSuite. Table of Contents generator in Word is probably the biggest one I hate that is missing, and the clipboard nonsense isn't great either, but last time I used it in gsuite it wasn't a problem.

[Mauricebranagh]

And that's a pretty low bar for power users BTW.

Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion.

But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.

[mhluongo]

Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s

Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.

[will4274]

Why did they apologize? I have to say, this smells political - if Excel and Sheets are just two pieces of software, then there's no reason to apologize for liking one more than the other. For somebody at the partner level to apologize and ask for a change in a users' workflow - seems like catering to people who have a political issue with Microsoft, rather than judging on technical merits.

[mhluongo]

Because it's a pain in the ass for us, their clients, to interface with their office software.

Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real estate financing hears many complaints from their clientele.

[ghaff]

GSuite (and probably O365) are probably actually pretty good examples of opinionated vs. the all the options offline MS Office.

Personally, myself and people I work with mostly like GSuite. We're probably generally described as heavy users but not power users, i.e. we don't need the features that only a few percent of people do. I actually find GSuite much more streamlined for my uses and collaborative editing is such a win. I do create fairly long docs sometimes but they're not complicated docs.

[Jenk]

Do you have any examples of what is superior in O365? As my other reply states I've found it to be the opposite - GSuite supports _more_ than MS does online.

[Mauricebranagh]

I did mean the real local word etc not the shite online versions.

Main thing is structured documents tracking changes, macros to automate processes.