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

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

#531

Post by vladvasiliu »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #514
alliao wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.

Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources.

Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh?

I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.

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

#532

Post by dbalatero »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #490
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is alway…

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster. The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vul…

I think the performance drop probably has more to do with managers & product folks expecting growth and features at all costs at the expense of keeping performance at some baseline.

I also wonder if it's just harder to continually monitor performance in a way that alerts a team early enough to deal with regressions?

That said, security _can_ impact performance! I work on Stripe frontend surfaces, and one performance bottleneck we have comes from needing to use iframes to sandbox and isolate code for security. Having to load code in iframes adds an additional network load before we can get to page render.

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

#533

Post by smelendez »

_7acn wrote: post #498

I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual). I've…

I use Pages as my default word processor. It doesn’t have all of Word’s features but I seldom need them, and it’s much faster than Word. I highly recommend it.

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

#534

Post by vladvasiliu »

fredoliveira wrote: post #483
lolinder wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly…

> Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites? Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds. Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partia…

> Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office

I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.

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

#535

Post by ubermonkey »

wkat4242 wrote: post #497
jajko wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care. Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right. Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bar…

Yeah the Outlook search function is... exotic. It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up. Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007. Same with OneNote by the…

We are a small software company.

We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.

SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).

I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?

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

#536

Post by Saris »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #392
bardak wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite GNOME developer's hill to die on is their refusal to implement a system tray or work with the rest of the Linux desktop community to create an alternative to the system tray. Don't get me wrong there has been a abuse of the system tray but the refusal to acknowledge that there is a use case for persistent notifications or status indicators is ridiculous. there suggestion is that notifications are the solu…

I am personally so glad Gnome does not have a system tray, on every other DE its a disgusting mess of differently scaled and styled icons.

That sounds like an issue that could be solved by forcing icons and sizes for the tray.

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

#537

Post by ubermonkey »

geekifier wrote: post #242
jajko wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care. Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right. Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bar…

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.

Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.

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

#538

Post by the__alchemist »

bborud wrote: post #530
the__alchemist wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice, the most popular office suite available for Linux, is comparably slow and bloated.

I haven't used the office tools on Linux for years, but since they are based on the same 30 year old idea of an office suite, would you expect them to be much better? I don't think it is productive to choose among equally antiquated and poor quality alternatives. It isn't going to advance the status quo. In terms of word processing (which is perhaps an archaic term by now) I would ask people to look at what Visual St…

I love this idea, and agree with your assessment of office tools in general. You almost make me want to try it, but it's evident the size this body of work would take.

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

#539

Post by ubermonkey »

swores wrote: post #136
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…

This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this: > «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoy…

In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution.

Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.

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

#540

Post by mleo »

tremon wrote: post #436
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is alway…

I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.

They used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.
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