Serious question though it may not sound like it - can you actually get decent work doing purely Office-based solutions? My career has been in 2 massive companies. Just an idle question.
In my experience, that would really depend on the scale and complexity of what you're doing. You can actually use a few of the Office products, notably Access, as fairly robust platforms for doing stuff.
Actually, Access (and maybe Excel) can effectively be used as a rapid deployment platform for internal stuff, as long as you're careful about what the users can access (haw, I made a pun) and everyone has the software. It doesn't scale well, but for a small office it's sometimes the quickest, easiest way to do the job.
When I was in the beginning of the second year with the insurance TPA (third-party administrator - we do various things for a bigger insurance company, but we're a pretty small company ourselves), I started working on an Access-based computer underwriting package. It's useful because it can be very quickly updated to fix bugs, is extremely easy to set up, and doesn't require the whole build cycle to deploy if something needs to change.
So I could've done the job in VB.NET or something, but realistically that would've just been more of a pain in the ass than needed. The software is used by around four people (including myself) who do the underwriting here, so it doesn't need to be massively scalable or even that user friendly (although I've done a lot to customize the Access interface to make it behave more like the users expect - for example, hitting CTRL+S saves the record they're working on rather than the form they're viewing).
All told, it works really well. It would scale horribly, and some of the code required to get Access to behave is a little funky (why in the everloving hell did they use
banker's rounding?! I had to write a piece of code to freaking round numbers properly), but to the users it's a dream and it was something I could develop part-time, since that isn't my primary job at the company and our IT department was too overworked to come up with something for the underwriting department in a reasonable time frame.
Sorry for the sermon, but the too long; didn't read answer is "yes." Basically. Sometimes. For smaller companies.
Also, I made full working versions of checkers (two-player, no AI) in Excel and Tetris in Access. Toot toot!
) it can be used for prototyping and workflow testing prior to any major comitment, as a lot of people can explain what they need in spreadsheet terms.