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Office 2000 is good to go

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

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Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#21

Post by easton »

gigel82 wrote: post #9

Sinofsky was pretty grounded in the early days but I've heard during the Windows 8 development he was burying his head in the sand, surrounding himself with yes-men and pretending like all (internal) feedback about the idiotic design was coming from people "afraid of change" (yes, literally replied that to someone that sent him honest feedback about the product). The folks that came up with the "remove the start butt…

This is what frustrates me about Microsoft sometimes. They try to stick to backwards compatibility as much as possible, then once in a while they decide to change something, usually do it not great (Windows 8), then they have to have a goodwill recovery period where they can’t break anything anymore. I think the backlash to 11’s changes means we’re probably stuck with the Windows 95 printer pane for another ten years.

With the advent of high speed virtualization, it’s okay to break stuff (shoot, they tried it with XP Mode in 7, don’t know why they haven’t tried it again). I don’t know if we still need 20 years of compatibility.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#22

Post by quietbritishjim »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19
quietbritishjim wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Drawing canvases * The new fonts (Calibri etc.) * Proper biliography support (not as good as BibTeX etc. but good enough for many reports) * Proper math support (not as good as LaTeX but better than the old equation editor and good enough for many reports) Certainly the pace of change is radically slower than in the old days (like Word 6.0 and Word 95) but enough that it's usually nicer to use recent versions rathe…

Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.

> Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.

I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't commonly come across something that's so much better that I wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something specific in mind?

The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years ago so if you feel that fonts "age" then you certainly won't like that one!)

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#23

Post by bluedino »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…

A big part of this is mentioned in the article:

> The biggest competition for Office 2000 was . . . Office 97.

> We were so heads down finishing Office 2000 that we didn’t realize how well received, and how good, Office 97 was.

They had to keep introducing new shit to get people to upgrade. If your feature was the hot new feature, you got promoted. So everyone wanted to get their pet feature in, and the users lost.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#24

Post by jankotek »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…

Win95 had very strict and consistent UI style. Office2k and Win2k were peak of this consistency. After that came WinXP and mismatch of inconsistent UI styles.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#25

Post by causality0 »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…

Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are pushing OneDrive.

Christ don't remind me. The galaxy-brains at my work decided every file on every PC needs to go into OneDrive on a constant-update basis. Between the fact we're still stuck using HDDs instead of SSDs and our network hitting 16 megabits per second on a good day, most people have managed to get an impressive amount of reading done while waiting for their PCs to do anything at all.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#26

Post by ComputerGuru »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #22
ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.

> Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well. I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't commonly come across something that's so much better that I wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something specific in mind? The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years ago…

I love Palatino, Garamond, and other timeless fonts. I just don’t think Calibri is timeless at all.

Calibri actually wasn’t preceded by Arial; it was a replacement for Times New Roman, which was the previous default font in Microsoft Word. (They made the switch from Serif to Sans Serif.) Arial - apart from being the default font in Notepad and WordPad - was never really part of the Windows aesthetic. The new Windows font is Segoe UI (which I think has only improved with age) replaced MS Sans Serif, which was an altered version of Tahoma (introduced with Windows 95).

If you use HN on Windows and are into fonts, I did a write up on two iconic fonts that are actually just one: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/

For my personal ”brand”, I was using Publico Text for a very long time, but now it seems to be everywhere so that’s a bit of a bummer :)

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#27

Post by xattt »

moolcool wrote: post #20
jonhohle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. Office 2000 and Windows 2000 are probably my favorite Microsoft software of all time. They performed well on mid-range hardware (I ran them on Pentium II and III), were the best they’ve looked (imho), and let you get things done. For a long time I installed Windows 2000 in VMs for running older games and software, even into the Vista days. I would accept arguments that Office peaked between Word 6 a…

XP's luna didn't run very deep though. XP was very similar in appearance to 2000 with a couple of minor settings tweaks

Classic mode was easy to turn on.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#28

Post by abraxas »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…

> When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time

This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6/Word97).

The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt they'd be where they are now in terms of market penetration.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#29

Post by mavhc »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
gigel82 wrote: post #9

Sinofsky was pretty grounded in the early days but I've heard during the Windows 8 development he was burying his head in the sand, surrounding himself with yes-men and pretending like all (internal) feedback about the idiotic design was coming from people "afraid of change" (yes, literally replied that to someone that sent him honest feedback about the product). The folks that came up with the "remove the start butt…

Reading between the lines of enumerous blog posts, I think him and his yes man were also responsible for torpedoing Longhorn and replacing all .NET ideas with COM. So now we have to "enjoy" that since then all new APIs are COM based. It is going to take decades to undo this, if until then we don't move all into "Azure OS" and it stops being relevant.

Breaking everything now to maybe win in the future is not Microsoft's way.

Their way is: Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing.

Re: Office 2000 is good to go

#30

Post by Someone1234 »

abraxas wrote: post #28
spaetzleesser wrote: post #8

I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess…

> When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the nati…

I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they'd get a mass of beginner/casual users that brought it with them into professional settings.

Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes/letters/etc. Excel is excellent for making lists of things and basic accounting/graphing.

Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office formats (ending in "x" e.g. docx) are night-and-day better (they're standard zip files with boring XML files within). People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very not-intiminating.

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