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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

#541

Post by smallerize »

ponector wrote: post #526
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers. > LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases. Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mea…

We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did! On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.

Oh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.

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

#542

Post by ct0 »

kyrra wrote: post #462
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…

If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows explorer alternative. https://filepilot.tech/ It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and will be really expensive when it leaves beta.

how does it compare to directory opus?

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

#543

Post by mdhb »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408
barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

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…

Instead they decided to build it with React if I remember correctly which is truly one of the fucking dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard of.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17310738

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

#544

Post by apricot »

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…

> It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties

I remember everyone complaining about how bloated they were at the time. Pretty sure someone in 2055 is going to run today's Office on 2055 computers and marvel at how streamlined it is.

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

#547

Post by lifeisgood99 »

_cenw wrote: post #250

It feels like different teams at Microsoft don't work with each other; they work against each other. I've noticed that too with Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short term metrics (shopping and "creator following" vs privacy, shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a coherent product. Maybe stack ranking does create te…

Teams at Microsoft operate like their own mini companies. For example, moving to a different team usually requires doing an interview loop, with coding challenges.

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

#548

Post by SoftTalker »

barrkel wrote: post #328
amiga386 wrote: post #241

What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: htt…

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

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

#549

Post by bsrkf »

Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software?

I would happily pay for software that

  was high-quality
  was fast
  was privacy preserving
  had sane defaults
  had/provided reasonable support/insight
    (forum and developer blog)
  had a fair pricing models
    (non-subscription, x-years of updates etc)
as in

  an e-mail client
  an office suite
  a scheduler
    (scheduling learning, tasks, various deadlines, calendar, ...)
  photo/video editor
    (wouldn't need to be of the scope of a professional suite)
  a browser
    (earnestly, one that wasn't a mere chrome re-skin, wasn't run by a bloated paid by Google organization like Mozilla, and would take fingerprinting prevention and privacy seriously)
  ...
or am I underestimating the problem? How many full-time developers working how many hours, building on open-source software where sensible (as in you wouldn't hand-roll your own cryptography, networking protocol implementations, GUI libraries) would it take, for e.g. a good cross-compatible Desktop E-Mail Client? (there's little in terms of software that I hate more than Outlook)

And given competitive non-US, maybe even non EU-wages for such developers, how many 'customers' with fair pricing would such a company/startup need?

You could open-source part of your stack (as in singular libraries) for exposure and good will, could maybe offer free-tiered versions, potential fair pricing models could be similar to Sublime's https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text you could build upon technologies people are exited about and willing to take pay cuts for if that's what they could work in (Odin, Zig, Rust, ...) etc...

Even considering vendor lock in, market dominance of existing solutions, the dominance of smartphones over desktops, isn't there still a viable market? Maybe what's left is even more so, given Desktop use seems (besides gamers) consist (to a significant extent) of power users, semi-professionals/professionals & businesses?

And, even though this place here is of course a highly niche bubble, the plights of modern's software lack of quality are real and I'm sure felt beyond us.

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

#550

Post by abrouwers »

tremon wrote: post #429
bigfatkitten wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft. As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id…

That's because you're not the target audience: both Windows and GNOME primarily target the computer illiterate. If you know what you're doing and understand how the computer works, these desktops at best are a nuisance and more than likely to get in your way. My go-to comparison is power tools: there's a consumer line that's underpowered but pretty easy to use by anyone, and then there's the professional tools for pe…

I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate." I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool, not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option, doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."
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