Office applications provide wonderful support for certain types of data: spreadsheets etc.  But these applications provide limited support for end-to-end processes, other than by complex programming in a low-level scripting language.

Say you receive a spreadsheet from all your branch office every week that contains a report which you have to consolidate in a summary and send to the finance department How does MsExcel support you to receive the report, validate the content, assimilate this individual reports into a single summary, and distribute the combined reports to the information consumers in your work process?  The answer is, outside of the powerful functions available in the individual worksheet container, and a scripting language, not much.

So next time you have to receive a spreadsheet, validate its contents, combine this information with other sources, and then distribute that information to multiple downstream recipients, take a closer look at our Windows-based software products.