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

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191–200 of 1001 posts

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

#192
I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stopping at any random time to load some bullshit becomes unbearable after some time. A bit like the chinese torture method where they would drop single drops of water on your head and over time it becomes painful.

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

#193
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.

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

#194
post #177

It goes really fast if you turn off the connected experiences like linked in, the AI crap, the splash screen, all the cloud shit and crack it with massgrave. Like office 97 speed. There's your problem.

I was going to ask: How much faster would it be if it didn't have to communicate with Microsoft servers over the internet on start up.

It makes no sense that modern Office won't start faster than Office 97. Sure it has more features, it's bigger in any way, but it's also not running of a spinning hard drive and 32Mb of RAM.

Can Office even start up without an Internet connection, or does it just take even longer?

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

#195
post #132

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…

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.

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

#196

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.

Then the OS team will fight back with options to disable all of these startup things. Like the Startup tab in Windows Task Manager with an "impact" column and easy button to disable annoying startup programs. It's interesting to even see it play out within the same company.

The only impact values I see on my home machine are "Not measured" and "None".

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

#197
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the licence, unliie the current crop.

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

#198
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!

The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace. If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.

Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts?

That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.

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

#200

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.

Raymond Chen wrote about this.
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