What is the percentage of features of Word, Excel and PowerPoint actually used by users

Question

What is the percentage of features of Word, Excel and PowerPoint actually used by users?

Answer 1

I haven't seen any statistics. I'm positive MS has numbers because they collected a bunch of use stats that they used in designing the ribbon

You may be able to find the answer in this series of blog entries about the design and building of Office 2007: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-contents.aspx

This is the firs relevant page: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/04/05/568947.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/04/07/570798.aspx

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Top 5 Most-Used Commands in Microsoft Word 2003

1. Paste
2. Save
3. Copy
4. Undo
5. Bold

Together, these five commands account for around 32% of the total command use in Word 2003. Paste itself accounts for more than 11% of all commands used, and has more than twice as much usage as the #2 entry on the list, Save.

Paste is also far-and-away the number one command in Excel and PowerPoint, accounting for 15% and 12% of total command use, respectively.

Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size") This is what makes creating the new UI challenging--people really do use a lot of the breadth of Office and beyond the top 10 commands there are a lot of different ways of using the product.

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