81–90 of 160 posts
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.
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.
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.
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.…
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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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…
Now we have a USB headset and voice calls over the IM software instead!
But I have three completely separately networked environments with three machines on my desk. I may be working on one with the other two locked.
If I am lucky enough to notice I am being called, I have to switch my headset over to that machine.
This now means a phone call requires instant messaging first to make sure the hardware is in place.
And don't even get started on the accessibility advocates take.
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…
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
(This is to be compared with e.g. OOXML spreadsheets, which go as far as to store the sheets of cells and the strings inside those cells in two completely different entries of the ZIP container.)
Everything that a Word document is maps 1:1 to a relatively straightforward string-of-bytes RTF. (With, again, the exception of OLE, which is why WordPad can write stuff that it assigns a .DOC suffix but is in fact an RTF stuffed into structured storage.) In fact, there was a piece of Microsoft software called the WinWord Converter SDK (Q111716) that used RTF as an intermediate format and had a bunch of DLLs that could read and write other formats; a compatible set of DLLs shipped with Windows and supported WordPad, and a larger one shipped with Word proper and contained all of its foreign format support.
However, if you look at that perfectly innocent, easily parseable RTF, you’ll find that it is still a nightmare. Not only because Word generated horrible unoptimized RTFs and only used Unicode text if it couldn’t avoid it, but also exactly because it can represent everything that a Word document is, and that is an unfathomable amount of stuff to be able to represent, even for Word 97. (None of which the alleged RTF spec tells you how to render or lay out.)
My personal answer to the question “why can’t one replace Word?”, or rather “why are all replacements for Word either failures or not particularly better?” is that Word can do (and thus supporting its format requires you to implement) so much that being compatible with Word is effectively equivalent to just being Word. To be fair, OpenOffice Writer is a pretty decent Word and I do use it when I need one, but it’s very uninteresting as a contribution to the field of handling formatted text on computers.
