At the present time, MS Office is the communication tools of the day. If you are not very comfortable with Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, than you will have severe issues with being an effective communicator. Layer onto that Visio and Project as being programs you should be familiar with, but may not need to be an expert in.

It boils down to how people communicate and today almost all communication involves MS Office applications in some way or another. If you are proficient you can get by, if you are an expert you can use them to persaude.

I'd say in most cases you can go pretty far with just basic knowledge of MS Office. I mean everyone is able to write a few paragraphs of text in Word and do basic formatting etc.

To put it in other words - I've seen people entering project management job and they had no problems in learning basic functions of MS Office they needed in their job (no matter if we talk about Excel, Project or Visio). I wouldn't ask a candidate during interview about MS Office - even when they don't know it they'll learn it.

I agree with Meade Rubenstein and JBancroftConnors above. It comes down to the ability to communicate. Being a project manager is first and foremost about communication. That doesn't mean you have to be able to turn pivot tables on their ears or make 3D graphics explode out of Powerpoint presentations. But if your stakeholders and project team use MS Office to communicate, you're at a decided disadvantage if you can't receive and understand their documents, and respond to them in a form they expect.

That being said, if you have people that are prepared to dump printouts on your desk (there goes your enviro-friendly status) and will create any documents your office needs to create, a worn-down telephone is really the best tool for the job.

Knowledge of the tools being used by your company, your client and your users is essential - MS Office or Open Office or anything else. You need to communicate in the form and fashion that they do. A PM's main role is risk reduction and secondary communication - and you can't reduce risk without being able to communicate about it...

Neither knowledge of MS Office or MS Project are necessary for a project manager. But you'll have a hard time finding work in a professional environment without knowing a standard word processing program and spreadsheet. It could be MS Office or Google Docs or Open Office, etc. But these are standard tools of a modern office.

That being said, if you are a project manager working outside of an office, say in an economic development capacity (and you didn't have to communicate or report directly to donors or sponsors) understanding projects and delivering results is most important.

I have never met a project manager who did not have good knowledge of MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

By good knowledge, I mean that they can do type a text, have the basic formatting, table of content, some basic Excel skills.

Regarding MS Project, I personally dont think its necessary. It might be a requirement in some jobs, but most times it isn`t (at least that is my experience).

I am not sure is is absolutely necessary for all project managers, but I would tend to say that at least Word, Excel, Powerpoint are necessary for most project managers jobs.

MS Office is de-facto standard for office productivity software. Forty years ago a PM would need a small group of support staff to just type out and send letters, model financials, do forecasts, organise incoming post, produce charts, collect and analyse data or conduct a quick research.

Thanks to the software projects nowadays became much leaner, meaning less support staff, giving greater analytical power to decision-makers, giving more flexibility in tailoring or creating PM infrastructure that suits particular project requirements, presenting project team with the power of scaffolding, building a disposable yet incredibly productive information management environment quickly.

Is good knowledge of MS office necessary for project manager? The answer is yes and given that the luxury of copious support staff is the thing of the past for absolute majority of the projects productivity software became one of the essential PM everyday tools and it’s worth knowing your tools well.

An expert PM armed with MS Office will beat in both efficiency and effectiveness his equally skilled counterpart with a “worn-down telephone” any time.

Knowing MS Office well, including office automation, will open up entirely new ways of searching, organising, collecting and analysing information. Communication aspect is just a tip of the iceberg, the icing on top of the cake.