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Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

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Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#51

Post by slownews45 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #43

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.

Yeah, the speed of the older stuff was amazing - EVEN on older machines.

Office 365 with the plugins now required at work / one drive etc - slow.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#52

Post by thereddaikon »

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…

Targeting casual use was the key. Even in the "professional" world almost nobody uses the Office applications to their full extent. The people who can are using more appropriate software. Accountants have Intuit and Peachtree, Anyone working in graphics, design or typesetting will use the appropriate Adobe app or competitor. Power Point is probably the only member of the suite that doesn't have a more "professional" equivalent. But there are definitely people who are more adept with it in the business world.

Office was probably feature complete in its second or third iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice are in interface overhauls.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#53

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

I'd say 2003 is the last best version. It's the last version without ribbon and it is able to support OOXML with an addon. The UI experiments like partially hidden menus are all disableable if you don't want them.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#54

Post by ComputerGuru »

StevePerkins wrote: post #46
ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

No, I meant dated as in “the novelty of it wore off and without that it doesn’t stand on its own two feet.” (If you read my other replies, you'll find that we are probably in complete agreement.)

I probably qualify as a font snob (although hopefully not a pretentious one). Either/both of Arial or Helvetica are better designed than Calibri. Arial is available with some “fixes” as Arial Nova for free on the MS Store. Georgia, used everywhere as it is/was, will never be old or dated in my lifetime (but there’s a Georgia Pro with more weights and some changes to hinting available for free on the MS Store). Tahoma/Verdana [1] has aged beautifully and remains excellent for the web (as evidenced by its use on HN) - it's also permanently associated in my mind with being the MS Encarta body font long before Wikipedia was a thing.

All but Arial were designed by the one and only Matthew Carter.

(Times New Roman was certainly overused and elicits some unpleasant gut reactions thanks to its guilt by association with poorly formatted and improperly typeset Word documents but is nevertheless still a classic - and of course its core origins long predate the web.)

[1]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#55

Post by udev »

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…

I am a Windows user since 3.11 (so 25+ years).

I am yet to see a single instance when a troubleshooting wizard was not a complete waste of time.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#56

Post by jl6 »

Oh for the simplicity and consistency of Office 2000. I now live in the hell that is Office+SharePoint+Teams, where features churn at random intervals and nobody knows where anything is really stored.

This is a real thing that happens to me regularly:

Someone sends me an email with a spreadsheet attached. Except it’s not an attachment, even though it looks like one. Needless to say I can’t access it until I’m online. I get online and find that the attachment is actually some kind of link. I click it and it opens a web browser. Inside the browser is Teams. Then actual Teams opens, and inside Teams is a half-assed version of Excel. I can do some casual browsing around the spreadsheet, but I need real Excel to use it properly. There is a button to open the spreadsheet in Sharepoint, but I avoid that because I know it’s a trap (Sharepoint is where the three-quarter-assed version of Excel lives). The button I need is “Open in Desktop App”. And I finally get to use the spreadsheet. But apparently it is stored on Sharepoint? Or is it OneDrive? And Teams is actually Sharepoint behind the scenes anyway? Autosave will be turned either on or off, randomly, so maybe my edits are being auto-shared with other users? I guess I can get back to an old version because Sharepoint versioning is turned on. Or maybe it isn’t? I can share the spreadsheet with a colleague, but I can choose to make it read-only - so how does that work? Have I now got two copies of it, a read-only one and a writeable one? Is it really my file anyway, since I got the link to it from someone else originally?

(I do actually know the answers to some of the above questions, but what an utter farce it has become).

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#57

Post by btilly »

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…

Sorry, I have to give bonus points for, "their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems."

The point where Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect was when Microsoft released Windows 95, which somehow broke WordPerfect, and refused to give Corel any access to it in advance of the release. By the time Corel had figured out how to make WordPerfect run 6 months later, it was too late, Microsoft Word was more widely used.

Incidentally the original formats were literally a dump of in memory data structures. Which means that compatibility became a huge headache every time Microsoft tried to change its internal data structures. That's WHY they migrated to the docx format.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#58

Post by ascagnel_ »

gigglesupstairs wrote: post #42
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.

It's not really any better -- while I haven't dug in too deeply, the current macOS versions are basically the iPad versions running in a window with a mouse pointer.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#59

Post by miohtama »

Arrath wrote: post #48
causality0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Sounds like an organizational issue in your work place. Usually these are the best dealt by changing the employer. They rarely get fixed from within the organization itself.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#60

Post by lostgame »

slownews45 wrote: post #51
dmitrygr wrote: post #43

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.

Yeah, the speed of the older stuff was amazing - EVEN on older machines. Office 365 with the plugins now required at work / one drive etc - slow.

There’s no excuse for a word processor to be anything but. :(
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