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Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

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Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#91

Post by baud147258 »

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…

What I find the worst about Teams' search is how it can find individual messages, but not the context surrounding them! So you can find the question you asked 6 months ago, but not the answers! And no way to go back to a precise date in the past (or I haven't found it) and scrolling too quickly is buggy.

Between my two work computers, I have different versions of outlook and between the two, Microsoft seriously screwed up the search.

Though I don't have issues with the windows search, maybe because I don't search inside the files (I don't use windows search to do that)?

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#92

Post by GloriousKoji »

srmarm wrote: post #6

I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair few years. I still pay £30 or so a year for the annual licence when it comes on sale just to be able to open docs natively though!

PowerPoint's automatic subtitles is the only new thing that actually really impressed me.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#93

Post by baud147258 »

thereddaikon wrote: post #52
Someone1234 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> Targeting casual use was the key.

I feel like that's what Google does with chromebooks and their editor suite

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#94

Post by manpagereader »

Office 2000 was much better software than anything that came afterward. Even Works '98 was far superior.

Frankly though, allowing office workers to putter around with fonts, spacing, and the like is a waste of their time. Plain text should be enforced in inter-office communications and anything which needs to be sent out should also be composed as plain text and formatted with TeX into a unified corporate style.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#95

Post by GekkePrutser »

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.…

> But apparently it is stored on Sharepoint? Or is it OneDrive? And Teams is actually Sharepoint behind the scenes anyway?

Yep it is and in fact so is OneDrive itself. So in the end everything is stored in SharePoint. Somewhere. Somehow. SharePoint isn't exactly good at finding stuff however so it's all there somewhere but doubt you'll ever find it back in SharePoint proper.

Totally agree with your post by the way. Office 2000 was also really fast (even on my Pentium 1 laptop!), offered all the features I need even today and didn't constantly update itself changing stuff around or breaking things.

But selling one copy in 21 years is not a good business model and software as a service is what Bill was crazy about even then. So O365 was inevitable.

I think SharePoint is by far the weakest part of the offering though. Even without it being used as a backend for the other services it inevitably ends up a trash bin of old stuff that nobody knows how to find or update. I've even seen the most rigidly managed projects fail miserably.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#96

Post by CamperBob2 »

okeuro49 wrote: post #78
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

Works for me.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#97

Post by ropeladder »

thrower123 wrote: post #36
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 used a portable version of Word 2003 for many many years. It would run off an old 128MB flash drive. The extra clicks every time you try to save anything in newer versions of Office before you can get to a file picker dialog is truly maddening.

F12 is your friend here. (It brings up the old file save as menu in most office software, wish it was more standard, actually)

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#98

Post by CamperBob2 »

phaedrus wrote: post #69
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 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…

You can show codes in Word. They've just buried it about 12 layers deep.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#99

Post by GekkePrutser »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #89
jmnicolas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We got rid of our business desktop corded phone recently. 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…

Well my desk phone is the old office thing I miss the least. And I was actually an accredited Avaya administrator.

But I moved to mobile management as I saw the storm coming. I really don't see the need anymore for intra-office communication and the IM tool is way nicer than the Avaya softphones ever were. Funnily enough their first one was pretty lightweight and great and then they kept rebranding it and making it this bloaty, slow and ugly "One-X" thing.

Also I LOVE the trend of people asking first if I'm available for a call. That's an amazing trend.

I also work on multiple machines too but I'm always signed in on my phone too so if someone rings me on Teams I'll hear my mobile going off.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#100

Post by GekkePrutser »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #96
okeuro49 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Works for me.

Yeah at least you could still find that back. And if you misplaced it, it was your own fault and not just lost in some dark corner of the cloud.
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