70% of workers don’t use Microsoft Office – report

A study has claimed that 70 per cent of workers don’t use Microsoft Office.

The three-month survey of nearly 150,000 workers, conducted by analytics firm SoftWatch, found that only three in 10 employees use the productivity software suite ‘to any extent’.

The report also discovered that those who do use the applications only spend an average of 48 minutes each day using them, primarily for viewing or editing documents.

The most popular Office programme was found to be email app Microsoft Outlook, which accounted for roughly two thirds of the time spent using any Office programme. Excel, the second most popular programme, clocked up only eight minutes on average.

Of all the employees surveyed, almost a third (29 per cent) only use Microsoft Word or Excel to view documents, and never edit any files. In addition, a fifth (20 per cent) of users described themselves as ‘heavy’ users of Microsoft PowerPoint.

Microsoft’s ‘Microsoft by the Numbers’ statistics sheet currently states that Outlook’s web-based email service Outlook.com has over 400 million active users and is the “world’s fastest-growing email service”.

The company also says that Office 365 Home Premium has 3.5 million subscribers, and that over one billion people – or one in seven – use Office software around the world.