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Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

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Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#431
post #98

Ugggh :( I miss my old Outlook 2013. Outlook 2016 is so slow it can’t keep up wirh my typing. I thought it already was javascript. Guess it will be even slower still. Super! (not)

If I'm typing a sentence that I am very familiar with, I can get up to 95 WPM and Outlook 2016 has no problems keeping up. Perhaps it's your computer and not Outlook.

The issue seems to be down to your network connection. As Outlook is sending or receiving emails and making other service calls you experience a slowdown. Onsite our connection is very slow and everyone experiences this problem. Additional bandwidth was not considered for the O365 and if you monitor your service calls with fiddler for example you'll see constant traffic to the O365 servers.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#432
post #282
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found the speed relates to the fileformat it is saved in. Might well still be slower, but in terms of speed ods > xls > xlsx for some reason.

I had it slow with plain CSV...

Plain CSV is ‘slower’ for whatever reason in my experience.

(I have no idea how other formats are structured)

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#433
post #40

FWIW, I personally like the direction Microsoft is going in. I look forward to seeing where this transformation leads.

The positive side of breaking compatibility with all legacy technologies (COM, VBA, XLL, etc) that currently force large companies to stick to MS Office is that it has the potential to reintroduce competition in the office-like software space. And in my opinion Office is the main reason why large enterprises stick to Windows. Most internal apps are moving to the web. If office backward compatibility goes away, then i…

How is it the reason to stick to Windows when MacOS has had Office for quite a while?

I think it's just people are used to the OS itself. I've seen people stick to Windows just because even in small companies.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#434
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying this nonsense. So, what the hell was this guy tweeting about?

In my experience most people in Microsoft have only a vague idea of what other teams are doing, even when none of it is really secret. If Office is starting to adopt React Native for some of its new UI components, and meanwhile there's a lot of work happening on the Office 365 web portal and Office web apps, internal telephone rumor circulation can morph that into "all of Office is being rewritten in javascript"

Nobody who truly participated in or contributed to the "complete" rewriting of Office in JS would be capable of expressing the positive emotions the subject of OP does...their soul would have been drained of the capacity to express joy long before the project would be completed. The tone smacks of the delusional cluelessness that MSFT's culture seems to uniquely foster.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#435
post #10

Excel is already a dog in term of realculating large spreadsheets. I think we will need Intel's 28 cores at 5GHz monster!

Even just scrolling is laggy in Excel to the point where it makes it hard to scan through data. LibreOffice does not have this problem.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically true, but in practice, the culture matters. JS ecosystem is what it is - based on past and current experience, you can't expect efficiency coming from there.

Maybe not from the ecosystem at large, but from Microsoft, on something like Outlook, sure you can expect efficiency.

I am not aware of a single piece of software written by Microsoft that I would call efficient, apart from maybe Notepad or MSPaint.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#437
post #98

Ugggh :( I miss my old Outlook 2013. Outlook 2016 is so slow it can’t keep up wirh my typing. I thought it already was javascript. Guess it will be even slower still. Super! (not)

If I'm typing a sentence that I am very familiar with, I can get up to 95 WPM and Outlook 2016 has no problems keeping up. Perhaps it's your computer and not Outlook.

We're talking about pressing keys on a keyboard and the corresponding letters appearing on the screen, maybe even with spellchecking. This has been computationally achievable for decades. It's not something where you need a state-of-the-art PC in order to be able to experience it.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it gets better. If you look at the appx package names for "Groove music" and a couple others they're still Microsoft.Zune prefixed

Thats because the team that wrote Groove Music (and Movies & TV) originated from the Zune desktop player and Windows Media Center. In fact it still used a lot of core code from the Zune days for things like library management and DRM. Source: former dev on the team.

The Zune desktop app has to be the best music player I've ever used, it was awesome. I continued to use it long after I moved on from my Zune HD. Sad to see something so awesome abandoned.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#439
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VBA is really useful and it's not like there is something to replace it, so I hope it does not die.

Lua, Python, Ruby, ...?

Can you embed any of those in Office documents? No.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#440
post #361
post #3

Office for Windows (WIN32) will be an Electron app? I have no words. edit, since there seems to be some confusion: I am explicitly talking about the WIN32 variant, which he confirmed to be based on Electron.

I’m an engineer in Office. This is not the case. The desktop app’s are fully native, and will remain so. They utilize React Native for a few components, but otherwise are written in C & C++.

Office for Windows has components written in react-native? Really? Any examples?
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