The Other 80% Features...

How
many times did we hear about using just the 20% of the features in a
software like MS Office. Yes, it is true that we only use 20% of the
features most the time, but then, some times we do have a need for one
of those other 80% features we don’t use normally. So it becomes
important for software to offer those other features.

We
believe users, especially business users purchase software with more
depth and useful features. It is not because they use these features
regularly, but because they have the features when they need it. It is
kind of like your camera on your phone. You may not use it very
regularly, but then you have it handy for that one moment you want to
capture.

For a professional writer,
features like Word count is very essential. For a student/researcher an
equation editor can be priceless. For some users, features like
pagination, Headers, Footers, Table of Contents are important. I don’t
use any of these features, but for me, collaborative editing and
sharing are biggie. For me, features like Table of Contents fall into
‘the other 80%’ category where I don’t use them regularly. This may not
be the case for you. The need for these ‘advance features’ or so-called
‘the 80% of the features I don’t need’ varies from person to person and
it eventually becomes important for software – especially the software
that caters to a broad audience, like an office suite – to offer all
these features.

The point I am trying to
make is that the other 80% of the features we may not need regularly
varies between users. From a vendor’s perspective, it becomes important
to provide feature-rich applications, especially for broadly used
applications like an office suite. This is the reason we focus on the
depth of the application. Our Writer 2.0 is a step in this direction. Features like Pagination, Header/Footers, End notes/Footnotes, TOCs, Equation Editor etc may not be ‘cool’, but they are useful when you need them. Same is the case with features like Pivot Tables or Macros. These are features we may not use on a daily basis, but we have many users using these features every day.

We believe in feature-rich applications and we will keep adding more depth to all our applications.