Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup • Hacker News Board

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#71

Post by mrandish » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:23 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #53

mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.

If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#72

Post by jpalawaga » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:23 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #59

spicybright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually not sure why so many people are saying it's slow. For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my password.

Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.

can you come up with any other reasons why an out of the box mac might be faster than something involving vdi engineering?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#73

Post by noisy_boy » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #53

mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks.

Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#74

Post by gtech1 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #53

mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

Check out Only Office

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#75

Post by bhouston » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:48 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#76

Post by mrandish » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:49 AM UTC

cosmotic wrote: post #69

everdrive wrote: post #44

Ah, the oldest trick in the book. Luckily, I'm sure that no on else will think to try this trick, and Windows will continue to load quickly.

My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...

At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported.

Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back.

Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#77

Post by packetlost » Thu, May 01, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to 2012~ era MS Office.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#78

Post by nine_k » Thu, May 01, 2025, 2:02 AM UTC

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #39

gibibit wrote: post #4

I still can't believe how slow MS Word is to load a .docx document of about 150 pages of text, you can watch the page count in the status bar grow over a period of 10 seconds or more as it loads/paginates it. On the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l

I often wish Word from around 2000 back. Back then the software was straightforward and did what it was supposed to do without much fuzz. And the speed on modern hardware would be crazy. The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.

I'd say that Office 97 was the pinnacle. I think you can still reasonably use it if you happen to have a copy.

This is of course problematic if you receive documents from other users :(

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#79

Post by mrandish » Thu, May 01, 2025, 2:06 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #56

NoPicklez wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from login than my Mac.

I don’t like Windows. And it is baffling to me that startup speed is a figure-of-merit nowadays given how absurdly fast drives have gotten. With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever). Sometimes when peopl…

> Windows startup is perfectly fine

No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).

I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.

Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#80

Post by milch » Thu, May 01, 2025, 3:02 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #76

cosmotic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...

At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported. Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or…

Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.