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

pcworld.com

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

#121

Post by bflesch »

noisy_boy wrote: post #73
Spooky23 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).

Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.

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

#122

Post by threatripper »

kilotaras wrote: post #119

Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus. Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others. One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

The solution is simple: New OKRs and KPIs in the next cycle reversing some of the current ones, then new bonuses for reaching them. Repeat.

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

#123

Post by herbst »

rappatic wrote: post #6

Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.

Recently needed windows for a single piece of software (I hate myself for it) and used a PC I had around (dell Wyse 5070) manjaro Linux Bootet in about 9 seconds.

Windows 10 on the other hand takes nearly a minute to get to login and it hasn't stopped booting then, another 20 seconds or so after login it's not responsive.

And only if it doesn't decide to update or do system repairs for 5 minutes, or more if it goes into one if it's restart update loops.

It's not a little more, it literally killed at least an hour of productivity in just a few weeks

(That's not counting the productivity killers once the system is running)

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

#124

Post by iLoveOncall »

blitzar wrote: post #108

To be fair to Microsoft, Excel crashes far less frequently than it did 10 years ago so that is something I guess. I would put the "productivity gains" from that alone at +40%.

Probably because you have a way better computer.

My girlfriend and I work in the same company, I have an M1 mac because I'm a dev and she has a shitty Dell laptop with Windows. Sometimes it's easier for her to send me an Excel, make the edit for her and send it back, because Excel constantly hangs on her laptop.

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

#125

Post by bflesch »

snappr021 wrote: post #100

Microsoft is too slow full stop. When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry standard software?

Desktop linux has all standard software. It's just incompetent IT teams trying to sugarcoat the fact they keep throwing money down the Microsoft drain.

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

#126

Post by atoav »

As someone who programs embedded systems the bloat people have grown to accept in the userspace is utterly mindbogling to me.

Sure it is a challenge to write performant code, I know that as well as any other embedded programmer, but my feeling is that in userspace or web programming most people have stopped even trying to be performant.

They will give you paginated content with 10 items per page, items whose data makes up less than 1% of the javascript they are loading. Meanwhile you could literally give people all items with no javascript and be faster (if you have the luxury of knowing the number of items).

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

#127

Post by ptx »

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.

It probably depends mostly on what you're used to. I find that LibreOffice looks fine - no worse than most apps, and much better than Microsoft's UI.

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

#128

Post by bflesch »

jackconsidine wrote: post #67

Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a while. We were working on a job-seeker / employer match-making application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints. The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random…

They already have the "wallpaper of the day" feature with small description text to keep you busy while waiting.

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

#129

Post by RedShift1 »

gosub100 wrote: post #42
Retric wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer machines so it’s not part of their bottom line. They have little incentive to care as long as it’s not so slow their monopoly breaks.

Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.

They have been breaking things left and right for quite some time now, I don't think they care about this anymore.

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

#130

Post by ptx »

bflesch wrote: post #120
mrandish wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.

LibreOffice also does this.
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