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Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

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Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#71

Post by ocdtrekkie »

> The biggest competition for Office 2000 was . . . Office 97.

And this is why Microsoft and Adobe are both pushing their products entirely over to subscriptions which stop working if you stop paying: They really don't do anything from version to version that justifies the cost or effort in upgrading.

Subscription pricing for desktop software is an incredible way to tell your customers you have a lot of employees to feed that don't really do much to deliver new value to the customer.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#72

Post by vb6sp6 »

endgame wrote: post #68
SubiculumCode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Globalization happened

English "250 views" = 8 chars wide German "250 mal angesehen" = 17 chars wide

English "FAQ" = 3 chars wide Portuguese "Perguntas freqüentes" = 20 characters wide

It isn't uncommon for english words to expand 200-300% when translated to other languages.

I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version of netscape to see how they fit those labels

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#73

Post by SubiculumCode »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #72
endgame wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Globalization happened English "250 views" = 8 chars wide German "250 mal angesehen" = 17 chars wide English "FAQ" = 3 chars wide Portuguese "Perguntas freqüentes" = 20 characters wide It isn't uncommon for english words to expand 200-300% when translated to other languages. I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version of netscape to see how they fit those labels

I imagine that abbreviations are common in these languages?

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#74

Post by sys_64738 »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #7

I 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.

Office 97 was their high point and I really didn’t see the value proposition trying others which seemed like attempts to refactor the GUI every few years. That and no product activation. From a time when owning software meant owning it.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#75

Post by int_19h »

abraxas wrote: post #28
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…

> 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…

The native Word file format is so complicated because it was basically a filesystem in a file, designed for extensibility scenarios such as embedding documents into other documents via OLE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#76

Post by spaetzleesser »

miohtama wrote: post #59
Arrath wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Throwing a fit while the VP is around often helps :). It always amazes me how quickly things get done when the guy who controls the budget wants something.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#77

Post by vb6sp6 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #73
vb6sp6 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization happened English "250 views" = 8 chars wide German "250 mal angesehen" = 17 chars wide English "FAQ" = 3 chars wide Portuguese "Perguntas freqüentes" = 20 characters wide It isn't uncommon for english words to expand 200-300% when translated to other languages. I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version of netscape to see how they fit those labels

I imagine that abbreviations are common in these languages?

It really depends on the phrase. FAQ was just used as an extreme example.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#78

Post by okeuro49 »

jl6 wrote: 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.…

On the other hand, when Office 2000 was popular, the popular alternative was quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#79

Post by int_19h »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
gigel82 wrote: post #9

Sinofsky 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.

My biggest beef with Sinofsky is that he was apparently the one heavily pushing for JavaScript as a high-level ".NET replacement" for end-user apps running on top of all that COM API in Win8. So much effort spent on dev tooling around that, when it could have been spent on improving .NET instead.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#80

Post by tiffanyh »

jl6 wrote: 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.…

100%.

I can confirm above is entirely real and extremely painful. I too experience this daily.

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