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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

#611

Post by Tempest1981 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #539
swores wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.

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

#612

Post by dagmx »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #568
MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

Telemetry, syncing to the cloud by default…

Neither of which contribute significantly to size though. The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help with.

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

#613

Post by kstrauser »

smelendez wrote: post #533
_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.

Same. I use Word only to edit Word files that I have to send back to someone outside my company. That's not often for me. Pages is vastly better for every other use case I have.

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

#614

Post by Tempest1981 »

bambax wrote: post #132
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…

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 seem to recall some layout issues running on a 4k display, or with scaling set to 150% or higher.

I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.

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

#615

Post by agilob »

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…

This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.

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

#616

Post by dijit »

jollyllama wrote: post #593
dijit wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The crash was caused by a data parsing issue for the code in the kernel (the heuristics database).

If they had not tried to parse data inside the kernel it would not have been an issue.

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

#617

Post by afavour »

MisterTea wrote: post #555
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.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary.

Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.

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

#618

Post by Qem »

BarryMilo wrote: post #289
jeroenhd wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.

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.

LibreOffice has dynamic tables, an equivalent to pivot tables, for many years already.

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

#619

Post by stcroixx »

MisterTea wrote: post #555
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.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

Skilled programmers working on boring stuff like office. Most programmers today don't have the skills they think they do and would find working on something like Office boring.

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

#620

Post by stevage »

_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…

> A 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.

And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.

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