Not using them. Its amazing what you can accomplish with a plain text editor and your brain. Ever seen a presentation that didn’t rely on PowerPoint? It’s such a refreshing thing to witness. How many Excel “applications” have you used that actually worked as intended consistently and weren’t just a giant time suck that would be better spent building a simple form over data app?
Ask yourself this: When was the last time you truly needed MS Office to produce something of value? Not imaginary enterprise “I look busy so I must be getting things done” value... but true value.
Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX?
Sure, designers create beautiful presentations outside PowerPoint, but I can grab master slides, plomp down the stuff that I wrote in a plain text file and bam - presentation ready in 10 minutes.
Excel - I'm a programmer but even I use Excel for quick data tasks - cleanup, remove duplicates, create histogram and summary, build a pipeline for data where I see intermediate values for every step for every data point. I might be an exception but I sometimes even copy data from an SQL client to Excel to drill into it.
Or Access? Entire departments of non-technical people are running on this stuff.
If Office didn't provide anything of value nobody would use it.
> Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX?
I've never written a thesis (at all, let alone for a PhD), but my impression from people who have is that the academic institution typically already has a LaTeX .sty or template or whatever, so literally all you're doing is writing content (and the minimal amount of markup necessary for document structure).
That said, I can see how this might quickly go sideways as soon as you start using TikZ, or if you do indeed have to create your own style (though in the latter case the defaults seem reasonable, and indeed seem common if the numerous academic papers I've read over the years are any indication). I've written my fair share of technical documentation with LaTeX and it can definitely be a rabbit hole, albeit usually a self-inflicted one.
And that's definitely true about Excel and Access. Virtually every company has at least one Excel spreadsheet or Access database that's effectively mission-critical, lol.
Ask yourself this: When was the last time you truly needed MS Office to produce something of value? Not imaginary enterprise “I look busy so I must be getting things done” value... but true value.