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Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

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Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#111

Post by GekkePrutser »

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…

Oh yeah Win8 was such a big misstep. I really hated it and the server version which I still deal with sometimes today.

I think Win11 is pretty good except for the fact that there's way too many old style settings dialogs left over, just like Win10. If it was actually consistent I'd love its design.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#112

Post by GekkePrutser »

int_19h wrote: post #79
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also I think WinFS would really have been a great idea. I'm sad it was cancelled.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#113

Post by GekkePrutser »

hu3 wrote: post #83
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.

And it looked so clean! https://i.imgur.com/u9U8VLm.png

Totally agree except the MDI (Multiple Document Interface) was a really dumb idea. Having windows inside of windows. Now that I see the double window controls I remember how bad and confusing that was. And so much work moving all these scroll bars trying to reach other scroll bars inside them. Yuck.

Besides for MDI which a lot of MS apps suffered from, it was great.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#114

Post by CamperBob2 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #105
CamperBob2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Really? Where?

In my version (2010) it's File -> Options -> Display -> Show all formatting marks, and/or File -> Options -> Advanced -> Show field codes instead of their values. I've heard it's even harder to find in newer versions.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#115

Post by userbinator »

baud147258 wrote: post #91
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 screw…

and scrolling too quickly is buggy.

Blame the "designers" who thought infinite scrolling was a good idea. Combine that with a disappearing scrollbar and it's a usability nightmare.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#116

Post by dhosek »

int_19h wrote: post #75
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…

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

Once upon a time I worked for a company that did document viewer software (in the year and a half I was there it went through three names none of which I can remember). One of my first tasks was—no, seriously—debugging an issue where an animated gif in an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document wasn't being animated.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#117

Post by GekkePrutser »

zamadatix wrote: post #10
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!

Real time co-authoring with the cloud save locations is a killer for me as it got rid of a bunch of " final copy (3) FINAL - Jim's edits" crap. I think that was 2016 initially I think but it's gotten improvements since. But for single user "I want to edit a document" there isn't much to add since 2000.

True, that and the "Who has the shift schedule excel open on the server???? Close it please, urgent!!" emails all day :)

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#118

Post by GekkePrutser »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #114
GekkePrutser wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Where?

In my version (2010) it's File -> Options -> Display -> Show all formatting marks, and/or File -> Options -> Advanced -> Show field codes instead of their values. I've heard it's even harder to find in newer versions.

Thanks! At work we're on 365 sadly but now that I know what the options are called I'll Google them!

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#119

Post by mr_toad »

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

> quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls

People still do that even with Teams and SharePoint.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#120

Post by wombatpm »

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…

People don’t know how or why to use styles. I actually read the entire word manual that came with version 5 for the Mac. Best thing I ever did in grad school
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