I was collecting some stats on tags and wanted to share them with the group. There are about 230 questions currently (out of 16,000 total questions) that relate to Microsoft Office.
The MS-Office tag might make a good landing point for all questions relating to that software suite.
If we merged these small topics and left synonyms so that someone that wanted to ask a ms-word (or word) question, it wouldn't start again, but get lumped under Office. The benefit of having more questions using less tags is that the people answering a category of questions get recognized more rapidly.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/tags/ms-office/topusers
The downside is of course that larger tags lack specificity.
The only downside I can see is that we would lose the distinction of each product and people that are interested in following just Excel questions would not be able to sift out the rest of the questions easily. Yes, they could use an RSS feed for the search term - and the question will undoubtedly have the word Excel (or Powerpoint, Entourage, etc...) embedded in them so searchers will always find just the question they want regardless of how it's tagged.
Here are the current followers of these tags:
At present, it seems that the downside is small and the upside is larger, but I don't want to initiate a merging if everyone would rather wait this out and sees a benefit to the site of keeping these tags distinct.
So, if you have a Yes or No opinion, please start that answer and discussion below: