Not a Powerpoint (presenation graphics) user but a Spreadsheet is to me a useful tool. The last use I put Excel to was making as calender for as church cleaning schedule for Pip.

The attractions to me with Excel rather than another type of program (eg Word) were

a) That producing reasonable output is so easy, Excel works well for making boxes round cells.

b)With the built in date calculations it was relatively easy to calculate dates the way we wanted. In this case, we work on a 3 * 3 grid with months as headers and list the Sundays in that month below with allowance for 4/5 week months. All Pip has to do is enter a start date and the calender is produced - a lot simpler than having to get the dates from an other source.

The solution does not move people responsible up the the list but, still it saves a lot of works and was (well if I hadn't had problems over a crash elsewhere) easily solved or part solved. It also proved easy to make a second protected copy which mirrored the first to enable printing 2 rotas in one A4 landscape page.

I also se a spreadheet for similar purposes to Ed and it's "What if" abilities are useful.

Reasons for using any software vary and I believe there have been report writing vs book writing debates and the relatave strengths of WP and Word here before. For me, the spreadsheet, at least in some cases can be a solution where one wolud perhaps natuarly think "Word Processed Docment".

Jon