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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

#651

Post by hedora »

Illotus wrote: post #636
qwerty456127 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My recollection is completely different, software was really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory being so much more expensive.

This might match your recollection. x86 Win95 raytracing in javascript on my arm laptop is usable, but sort of slow:

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95

Once it boots, run povray, then click run.

It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov, though it did manage to use SSE!

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

#652

Post by dawnerd »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #260
geekifier wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...

Have to make it bad so when they inevitably force AI into it, it looks amazing.

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

#653

Post by tbirdny »

_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 used to be painfully slow. It was just maybe 3 years ago or so it improved a lot. It was practically unusable for large spreadsheets. I swear spreadsheets from 20 years earlier performed better on much slower hardware. If you haven't used Numbers for a few years, maybe give it another try.

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

#654

Post by keyringlight »

esskay wrote: post #432
PuppetSoup wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help. And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of the UI. And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box it should be pretty damn well polished so that you d…

One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.

It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.

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

#655

Post by worthless-trash »

gymbeaux wrote: post #512
kyrra wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the only file manager I’ve found that keeps up with the large directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.

When you have 100k+ files sometimes the filesystem itself matters. Have you set your expectations appropriately, aka compared it to a raw ls/dir ?

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

#656

Post by donny2018 »

jonhohle wrote: post #582
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 always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every 5 minutes (yesterday’s story). I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when other devs do the same.

Where is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in Assembly?

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

#657

Post by hedora »

toast0 wrote: post #594
qwerty456127 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oddly, I remember timing it, and the startup accelerator didn't seem to speed up Office start time. It slowed everything else down though.

I rebooted a lot though (mostly used Linux by then), so maybe it was just fighting with itself when I immediately fired up office after boot.

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

#658

Post by bokchoi »

dfedbeef wrote: post #569
kgeist wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, our company migrated from Jira to Youtrack (by JetBrains) and never went back.

I migrated to a team where you just tell your manager what you're doing and they remember it.

Me too! It's been so much nicer not having scrum and moving jira tickets around. We still have an issue tracker but it doesn't rules our lives.

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

#659

Post by hedora »

HideousKojima wrote: post #515
amiga386 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o... Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout. Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documen…

Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.

I frequently have to do this for a different reason on MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer and makes it spew garbage pages.

"Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable.

sigh

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

#660

Post by varunneal »

stevage wrote: post #620
_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.

hey there's preview
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