A life without software, instant communication, and analytics is hard to imagine. Just think about it, what would your work day look like if there was no email and direct messaging, just regular mail, fax, or courier?

Imagine getting your news from a newspaper. Go back to processing your printed receipts with your desk calculator and ledger. Try thinking about how you'd manage all your data without spreadsheets and pivot tables, or collaborating on a presentation without the cloud.

These days are long gone.

Software touches everything we do, particularly at work. But just because it is more integrated into our lives than ever, it is also taking a larger role in our happiness as employees and humans.

The right software can help us create and scale businesses, or earn a promotion but the wrong one can lead to wasting time and growing frustrated – even to the point of leaving a company.

A 2019 survey of 1,600 workers found that more than half (52%) of them have become unhappy at work at some point due to the software tools they're using.

Even more worrisome for bosses is that roughly one-quarter (24%) of respondents said the software at work has made them consider looking for a new job.

And more than one-in-eight employees (13%) have left a previous job over mismatched software.

Overall, the majority of employees surveyed reported that their happiness at work could be improved by having both the correct software for their role and, to a lesser extent, more software to do their job effectively.

95% of respondents said they would be “very satisfied” or “satisfied” if they had better software tools at work.

86% of respondents said they would be “very satisfied” or “satisfied” if they had more software tools at work.

With the widespread adoption of the cloud and the explosion of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, there is no question that these numbers are something businesses have to keep in mind when trying to attract and retain employees.

Also, software isn't just found on the work desktop – it should be available anywhere an employee can access the internet.

Of those surveyed, nearly half said that they use software for work more than six hours per day. Those same people believe in the power of those programs: nearly 95% agreed or strongly agreed that software can make them more productive.

According to Microsoft, there are 1.2 billion users worldwide that use some kind of Office product or service and the company's CEO Satya Nadell remains optimistic about the future.

"The growth opportunity for what is Office 365 is a lot bigger than anything we’ve achieved, even with our high penetration in the client-server world,” Nadella said.

But Nadella also talked up the company’s potential in the Azure public cloud infrastructure business, where it competes with Google as well as Amazon Web Services.

“We had a good business in our server business, but this business is orders of magnitude bigger than what used to be a successful server business,” he said.

At the same time, Microsoft has also found rising revenue in the sale of cloud-based business intelligence software for charting and analyzing corporate data, with the Power BI product, which competes with Salesforce’s Analytics Cloud and Tableau.

But as we can see from these memes, Excel is still going strong.