Still using office 2000. its simple and fast, never liked the later bells and whistles like the "ribbon". Sadly, windows 10 doesn't get along with it perfectly well.
Office 2000 is good to go
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Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#12I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair few years. I still pay £30 or so a year for the annual licence when it comes on sale just to be able to open docs natively though!
* Drawing canvases
* The new fonts (Calibri etc.)
* Proper biliography support (not as good as BibTeX etc. but good enough for many reports)
* Proper math support (not as good as LaTeX but better than the old equation editor and good enough for many reports)
Certainly the pace of change is radically slower than in the old days (like Word 6.0 and Word 95) but enough that it's usually nicer to use recent versions rather than older ones.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#13I fondly remember Office 2000 as the last version that didn't require product activation.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#14I still prefer 97, runs great in a VM, faster than LibreOffice, save the text with copy and paste into my blog with IE6. I can almost smell the shiny Plymouth Horizon on the parking lot.
The invoice I bill with is from an Office 97 template. Thursday will be it's 25th birthday.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#15I find modern Office impossible to be productive with. Editing charts in Excel is a particular frustration having to dig into a few submenus to do something basic like change the style of a marker. Manipulating data ranges is nowhere as intuitive as it was in Office 2000.
I don’t do any real work with Office anymore. If I need a Doc file I’ll export from Pages, even Numbers is generally better than excel for simple tasks and Keynote is much better than PowerPoint.
These data it’s much faster to fire up Matlab or Python can get actual work done.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#16I find modern Office impossible to be productive with. Editing charts in Excel is a particular frustration having to dig into a few submenus to do something basic like change the style of a marker. Manipulating data ranges is nowhere as intuitive as it was in Office 2000. I don’t do any real work with Office anymore. If I need a Doc file I’ll export from Pages, even Numbers is generally better than excel for simple t…
I use google docs and although it’s free it’s actually much quicker to use than modern office (for me at least - maybe because the interface is more similar to 90s office!)
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#17I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…
Completely agree. Office 2000 and Windows 2000 are probably my favorite Microsoft software of all time. They performed well on mid-range hardware (I ran them on Pentium II and III), were the best they’ve looked (imho), and let you get things done. For a long time I installed Windows 2000 in VMs for running older games and software, even into the Vista days.
I would accept arguments that Office peaked between Word 6 and ‘98, but everything after Windows and Office 2000 were worse. XP’s Luna was an ugly reaction to OS X’s Aqua. Things kept getting slower and larger for no obvious addition of functionality.
I’ve long since left Windows behind, but still have found memories of Microsoft circa 2000.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#18Sinofsky was pretty grounded in the early days but I've heard during the Windows 8 development he was burying his head in the sand, surrounding himself with yes-men and pretending like all (internal) feedback about the idiotic design was coming from people "afraid of change" (yes, literally replied that to someone that sent him honest feedback about the product). The folks that came up with the "remove the start butt…
Reading between the lines of enumerous blog posts, I think him and his yes man were also responsible for torpedoing Longhorn and replacing all .NET ideas with COM.
So now we have to "enjoy" that since then all new APIs are COM based.
It is going to take decades to undo this, if until then we don't move all into "Azure OS" and it stops being relevant.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#19I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair few years. I still pay £30 or so a year for the annual licence when it comes on sale just to be able to open docs natively though!
* Drawing canvases * The new fonts (Calibri etc.) * Proper biliography support (not as good as BibTeX etc. but good enough for many reports) * Proper math support (not as good as LaTeX but better than the old equation editor and good enough for many reports) Certainly the pace of change is radically slower than in the old days (like Word 6.0 and Word 95) but enough that it's usually nicer to use recent versions rathe…
Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.
Re: Office 2000 is good to go
#20I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…
Completely agree. Office 2000 and Windows 2000 are probably my favorite Microsoft software of all time. They performed well on mid-range hardware (I ran them on Pentium II and III), were the best they’ve looked (imho), and let you get things done. For a long time I installed Windows 2000 in VMs for running older games and software, even into the Vista days. I would accept arguments that Office peaked between Word 6 a…
XP's luna didn't run very deep though. XP was very similar in appearance to 2000 with a couple of minor settings tweaks