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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

#621

Post by deburo »

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…

They switched to hardware acceleration in the last few years and they removed the toggle to disable it. It still sucks (perf & rendering issues, eg. scrollbar not updating when scrolling) and there's no way to go back to the old rendering engine unless you disable hardware acceleration on Windows as a whole. Lmao.

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

#622

Post by trealira »

afavour wrote: post #617
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.

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 me…

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software.

About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR...

That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.

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

#623

Post by _Algernon_ »

eviks wrote: post #89
nine_k wrote: post #61

Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I preload Emacs and Firefox. Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off. (And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)

> why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck? To instantly find any file anywhere, nice productivity boost (among many)

Really? Windows isn't exactly known for the quality of it's search. It becoming consistently worse with every Windows version has been a meme for at more than a decade.

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

#624

Post by Oleksa_dr »

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.

All of these ‘fast’ file managers have a big problem: they don't support system calls to dialog windows.

Mostly users interact with the explorer in this scenario to open/save a file in ‘BrowserOS’

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

#625

Post by eviks »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #623
eviks wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck? To instantly find any file anywhere, nice productivity boost (among many)

Really? Windows isn't exactly known for the quality of it's search. It becoming consistently worse with every Windows version has been a meme for at more than a decade.

But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows search

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

#627

Post by dagmx »

jasonephraim wrote: post #598
_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

If you’re doing it often enough, you might benefit from using AppleScript to automate opening it in an app and changing setting . Not ideal, but it’ll make it a lot less annoying.

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

#628

Post by gwbas1c »

afavour wrote: post #617
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.

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 me…

It was always like that

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

#629

Post by _fat_santa »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #255
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

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…

I currently use Gnome on my machine (plain vanilla Ubuntu with no mods). It's such a love hate relationship. On the one hand everything you said and everything the child comments mention are totally valid and very annoying. But on the other hand (at least in my experience), Gnome has been the only solid DE that is "consistent", the only other one that got close was XFCE.

I might eventually switch back to XFCE but for now I just need a DE that works and gets out of my way so I can write code, and for all it's faults Gnome still gets the job done.

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

#630

Post by bbatha »

_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…

Also shout out to Keynote which is the best presentation software. PowerPoint is so clunky in comparison. Nice features like making image backgrounds transparent are huge wins.

Pages is also pretty nice. Its definitely enough for home usage, and if my colleagues could read the pages files natively I would find it completely sufficient for professional use. I find it does layout much better than MS Office. Which honestly is a much bigger concern for home users: professional users will just switch to professional layout tools when they need it, but Sam doesn't need that cost/complexity for some bake sale fliers.

Numbers can also be nicer for home use cases, but is a bit weird if you're used to excel. And unlike pages or keynote quickly hits upper limits on complexity. I would never use numbers in a professional setting.

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