Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 160 posts

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#41

Post by makecheck »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I 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…

Yeah, and I’m terrified by the “new” UI Outlook keeps prompting me to “try”, knowing that one day the old one will probably just go away.

The new UI takes up way more space and completely messes up my preferred split-screen approach (e.g. instead of working in a 50/50 layout, the new UI basically forces the split to be more like 70/30 with less useful stuff on screen).

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#42

Post by gigglesupstairs »

knolan wrote: post #15

I 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’ve found Numbers to be basically unusable on iPad. May be because some stuff works differently as compared to excel but its features are literally buried inside icon based interface which is a huge bummer. Should give it a go on Mac, may be it’s better there.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#43

Post by dmitrygr »

I still use Office 2000. On modern hardware, it opens faster than my mouse button finished coming up from the click on the icon. In an extremely un-microsoft-like move, a while ago microsoft released an add-on package for it called "office 2007 format converters" that makes it capable of opening and saving new xml+zip based formats.

I recommend this setup to everyone. Fast, smooth, no ads, and works well.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#44

Post by chris_wot »

makecheck wrote: post #41
spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I 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…

Yeah, and I’m terrified by the “new” UI Outlook keeps prompting me to “try”, knowing that one day the old one will probably just go away. The new UI takes up way more space and completely messes up my preferred split-screen approach (e.g. instead of working in a 50/50 layout, the new UI basically forces the split to be more like 70/30 with less useful stuff on screen ).

I just can’t work out how to turn off “focused” inbox. I want me mail, and all of it!

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#45

Post by pjmlp »

mavhc wrote: post #40
pjmlp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't their way, nowadays ask anyone burned with XNA, Managed DirectX, Silverlight, C++/CX, WinRT 8, UAP 8.1, UWP, WCF,.... how they feel about Microsoft support.

Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing. New thing fails, make a new new thing. So Managed DirectX was replaced with XNA. Silverlight was just MSFlash, although it used XAML which is still used today I assume. C++/CX was replaced with C++/WinRT WinRT the runtime started the sandboxing and ARM support path. What's UAP? UWP is still around, but again, no one cared because HTML5. And at least WCF is op…

Managed Direct X was replaced by an incompatible XNA, which was dropped on the floor, with the advice to learn C++ and move into DirectXTK.

Silverlight was the app framework for Windows Phone 7 as well, dropped on the floor for Windows Phone 8.

C++/CX was replaced by a junk framework that is basically ATL with a new name, with the same tooling as Visual C++ 6.0 with ATL.

UAP was the percusor for UWP.

The "compatibility story" goes like this. Windows 8 drops all compatibility with former Windows, but WinRT requires rewriting the application three times, for phone, tablet and desktop, due to the API space.

Windows 8.1 improves the situation by introducing UAP, where the views still have to be written three times, but the API space for business logic can be shared. Requires a rewrite from previous WinRT.

Windows 10 introduces UWP, as consolidation of three platforms, requires a rewrite from previous WinRT.

XAML islands get introduced as bridge between Win32 and UWP, a year later plan gets dropped and WinUI 3.0 gets introduced, and Project Reunion.

Yet another year ensues, WinUi is now merged with Project Reunion as the Windows App SDK.

Requires yet another rewrite.

In the middle of this, .NET Native gets dropped, and .NET 6 still doesn't provide the same AOT capabilities.

On the C++ side, a group of devs manages to kill C++/CX without any equivalent tooling, telling everyone complaining that customers should suck it up and wait for the day ISO C++ supports Herb Sutter's metaclasses ideas, so that they don't do any C++ extensions like C++/CX or god forbid Qt and C++ Builder.

Lots of enterprises stuck with .NET Framework use WCF.

As for Azure OS, lets see what the future holds, it isn't the only cloud OS in town.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#46

Post by StevePerkins »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19
quietbritishjim wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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.

When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more.

Calibri replaced Times New Roman as Word's default font, because TNR had become ubiquitous (and because docs were starting to be read on-screen more than in-print, so switching to a sans-serif default made sense). But TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Most of the commonly recommended alternatives (e.g. Baskerville and Garamond) pre-date it by decades or centuries, so it's hardly an "age" thing. It's just that readers don't see them as frequently as they do TNR.

Even Calibri came along simply because Helvetica/Arial were "old". But Apple (well-respected for typography) still use Helvetica as the body text default in their office apps. And only the most pretentious of font snobs, who have carefully studied the capital "R" and "G", could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. I still think that Arial is a much nicer font than Calibri for body text. It just feels "old" because people have seen it on Wikipedia pages a million times.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#47

Post by spaetzleesser »

Someone1234 wrote: post #30
abraxas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the nati…

I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they'd get a mass of beginner/casual users that brought it with them into professional settings. Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes/let…

"(they're standard zip files with boring XML files within)"

that's the container format. But the actual document data is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and Photoshop files are also a mess.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#48

Post by Arrath »

causality0 wrote: post #25
spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I 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…

Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are pushing OneDrive. Christ don't remind me. The galaxy-brains at my work decided every file on every PC needs to go into OneDrive on a constant-update basis. Between the fact we're still stuck using HDDs instead of SSDs and our network hitting 16 megabits per second on a good day, most people have managed to get an impressive amount of reading done while wait…

We were recently notified that external USB storage will soon be banned, and to use OneDrive to transfer files.

My question to IT of "Hey we have clients that explicitly only allow the use of their own (incredibly terrible) file transfer platform, and block OneDrive. We've been burning stuff to CD with a usb drive and hand delivering it, if you ban those wat do?"

Got the form "this is how you use OneDrive" response back. Love it.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#49

Post by yuhong »

Anyone remember the Access 2003 conversion toolkit? The conversion from Access 97 to Access 2000 was originally designed for developers, not conversions of large number of databases by end users.
Post reply on HN