This from the team that brought a tool to recover files corrupted by Office, rather than fix the causes of file corruption. Then it becomes a "feature" you can trumpet, rather than a bug you squashed.
Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#142Between 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 is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.
I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office look.
Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0
Very much seems like a matter of preference.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#143Team 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.
Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most people that work on it.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#144Between 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 use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.
I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#145Microsoft is too slow full stop. When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry standard software?
Proton made games run well on Linux, maybe all it takes is one big company picking up wine, and making it run all the different office software? It cannot be that hard.
I think its harder with "standard" software as it uses the Windows UI toolkit and stuff. Games usually only require an empty window to render + all the GUI is custom in DirectX/Vulkan/etc.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#146This from the team that brought a tool to recover files corrupted by Office, rather than fix the causes of file corruption. Then it becomes a "feature" you can trumpet, rather than a bug you squashed.
I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin and the antidote.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#147To 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%.
Excel 2003 never crashes. It's a little bit limited in number of lines and columns (but if you need that many you should probably be using a proper db).
Gotta have XLOOKUP if you are going to compete these days. It might be aimed at the more casual audience and party gamers but it is the meta.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#148For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you’d think they’d be concerned about the climate impact of this and why their applications are so inefficient.
They don't care about the climate impact. They care about the green washing PR. Probably decided that the cost of fixing this outweighs the potential PR benefit.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#149Earlier 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…
Not to be that guy, but at some point, if you ever decide that fighting a war with Microsoft to have control over your own computer and not be surveilled stops being worth it... linux. Yes, there's an upfront cost you pay to learn, and there are ongoing costs as defaults and tools change over the years.. but at least the relationship is not adversarial.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in 1997, most developers would show a 'splash screen' as their application loaded, because of course it takes time for applications to load.
Just to be clear current Office applications have a splash screen.
To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen.
I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup.
On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared.
These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.