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Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

61–70 of 160 posts

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#61
post #56

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.…

Everything I do is saved on sharepoint and onedrive. I don't know what the hell sharepoint is or how to access it or if it is even different than onedrive. but its happening at my institution so, hey.

I always attach real docs to my emails though never the editable linky things, and I periodically rename my doc under different file names to preserve older versions, even though I've heard it keeps autosaved versions somewhere inside the document. I guess I just like the "physicality" of separate document files for security.

All these things said, I actually like one-drive quite a bit. It allows me to easily switch between computers etc.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win95 had very strict and consistent UI style. Office2k and Win2k were peak of this consistency. After that came WinXP and mismatch of inconsistent UI styles.

I've had to teach people to use PCs many times, it used to be so much easier for this reason. You'd teach someone that "this icon mean THIS" and that would be that, but today that is impossible because there are five different graphics/ideas for each thing (plus of course iconography used to use analogies from real-life, like a pen for Word, bin for throwing stuff away, folders, etc). Windows 10 never really reached…

Its to the point where I'd rather have text than icons in the various menus.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#63
post #56

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.…

You make me happy that my company is too skint to buy all those solutions: we're still sharing Office 2016 actual files by email (some poor souls are still on Office 2010).

I uninstalled Teams from my PC (it was crashing) and only use it in Edge for the few confs I must participate in.

Now if I could throw away my (yup still corded) phone and stop my colleagues from coming to my desk to interrupt me, I would be happy ;)

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#64
Every comment here is about peculiarities of Office versions, but the article gave me false nostalgia for working at a place like Microsoft in the late 90s / early 00s. Evil Empire-ness (are_we_the_baddies.gif) aside, I mean.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#65

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.

Yeah, Office 2003 is the sweet spot. It's also the last version that installs entirely offline, without any attempts to sign in or phone home for verification.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#66
I am glad the author's habit of weirdly abbreviating the names of people in the text, regardless of whether the reader is likely to know them, is not widespread. BradCh, MikeMap, ScottRa, etc.

At least Dave Cutler gets to have a real name in this story.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#67
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…

As someone who spends most of his time in a text editor and only needs to use word processing/spreadsheets very occasionally, Office is absolutely torturous. Everything that's not achievable with a single click feels like it requires navigation through at least three modal sub-windows.

It probably doesn't help that I'm mostly Mac-based, considering Microsoft have decided that things like selecting text and drag and drop should work differently to literally every other piece of software I use.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had to teach people to use PCs many times, it used to be so much easier for this reason. You'd teach someone that "this icon mean THIS" and that would be that, but today that is impossible because there are five different graphics/ideas for each thing (plus of course iconography used to use analogies from real-life, like a pen for Word, bin for throwing stuff away, folders, etc). Windows 10 never really reached…

Its to the point where I'd rather have text than icons in the various menus.

Look at old pictures of (say) Netscape Navigator. Despite having far fewer pixels we somehow had enough to label our icons. What went wrong?

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#69
post #28

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…

> 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 was explaining to one of my coworkers how back in the day with WordPerfect you could click "Show Codes" (or whatever the menu option was called) and view all the embedded formatting tags as text rather than WYSIWYG. This made it incredibly easy to fix formatting issues and see what was wrong with an unintended interaction of styles. As people who had only ever used (read: fought with) Microsoft Word, they were mind-blown that such a thing once existed.

We maintain technical documentation and have to manually track page changes, which ultimately results in physical pages being printed and replaced in physical binders in many facilities. Use of Microsoft Word for this purpose is sketchy as f--- because when Word decides to "go nuts" and slightly reformat the next 100 pages (or worse, even previous pages) because of a minor edit, it turns a single page change into a hundreds-of-pages change apocalypse.

Of course we don't really let that outcome stand; what actually happens is an engineer (with occasional consultation of a documentation specialist) spends half a day tentatively prodding and undoing changes in an increasingly broken document trying to find a way through the maze that doesn't trigger either a formatting booby trap or Word's over-helpful malevolent AI.

The key point here is without the ability to "show codes" and edit the real underlying structure of the document not the WYSIWYG view, the entropy just increases over time.

We all agree that Word is not the appropriate software for what we're doing. Unfortunately the people with the power to fix this situation are the furthest removed from understanding our pain, and we have decades' worth of Word docs. And since Microsoft Office is the default, even when Word breaks compatibility we don't take advantage of that opportunity to move to a real document management system, they just keep buying the next version of Office.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#70
I miss buying office once and not having to tie it to a microsoft account, live in constant fear of it unregistering on an application server, resetting an office 365 user's password because it randomly stopped working. Office 2000 was so good I miss those times. It launched stupid fast, worked well, and I can't think of any bugs I ran into.
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