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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

#591

Post by kermatt »

jeroenhd wrote: post #579
BarryMilo wrote: post #289

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. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives. I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process…

> software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans

This sums up my entire experience of "Enterprise applications".

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

#592

Post by brainzap »

vjk800 wrote: post #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 stop…

Its sad because using Excel for quick decision making can be a super power, these days I use apple numbers

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

#593

Post by jollyllama »

dijit wrote: post #356
wafflemaker wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming? Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him. Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer. I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected. The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves ar…

> so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.

I don't understand, how could crowdstrike have avoided their issues by putting more code in the kernel? Or am I misreading your statement?

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

#594

Post by toast0 »

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 mean, as mentioned upthread, Office 97 (and Office 95 before it) was slow to load, so slow that they added the start up accelerator.

You can run Office 97 now and it'll start fast because disk i/o and cpus are so much faster now. Otoh Excel 97 has a maximum of 256 columns and 64k rows. You might want to try Excel 2007 for 16k columns and 1M rows, and/or Excel 2016 for 64-bit memory.

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

#595

Post by freeAgent »

jeltz wrote: post #583
freeAgent wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternatives are honestly not as good.

Libreoffice has vastly superior CSV support compared to Microsoft office. The alternatives often have different strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but I’ll take your word for it. For text operations, I frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.

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

#596

Post by prmoustache »

the__alchemist wrote: post #430
dimgl wrote: post #384

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads…

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

There are other like Anyoffice or Caligra Office. Or you can use any web based one...even office365 ;-)

If your needs are smaller you can do a lot with just abiword and gnumeric. They launch instantly.

Gnome evolution is much nicer to use than Outlook in my experience.

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

#598

Post by jasonephraim »

_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…

Numbers has it's issues as well. I have to open .csv files dozens if not hundreds of times a day - always the same format. Numbers will not allow me to default to freezing the first/header column or _not_ show the formatting sidebar on open. I have to set the freeze header option and close the sidebar every time.

At this point, I've started using IDE extensions when I just need to view/filter

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

#599

Post by xquce »

d_tr wrote: post #587
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 thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.

People don't use Office frequently, and then when they do it's slow and a bad look. So they will cheat in a way that prioritize their own software, and then every one else will then that feature loses all value, as all programs launch on startup as not to be "slow"

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

#600

Post by toast0 »

gymbeaux wrote: post #503
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…

Back in those days it took 15 minutes for Windows to “finish” booting. You’d hit the desktop but the HDD was still going ham loading a dozen programs, each with their own splash screen to remind you of their existence.

If you've had the priviledge of running Windows 10 on a spinning drive, it never gets to disk idle. Who knows what it's doing, but by that metric it never finishes. It probably never gets to disk idle on an SSD either, but SSDs have so much more io capacity it isn't noticed.
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