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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

#681

Post by strongpigeon »

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.

I used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.

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

#682

Post by zerkten »

QuicklyNow wrote: post #574
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.

I made an account to thank you for this. I've been looking for a _fast_ alternative to explorer since Windows XP. But one that doesn't require a change in workflow. This is the fastest I've tried by far. I've only been using it for 5 minutes, but I'm sold. Earlybird discount too! Thank you for posting this, and if you have any other speedy apps you'd recommend I'd welcome suggestions. Mine top suggestions are Speedcr…

Have you tried xplorer²? I only know about it because I was into Windows programming using the WTL eons ago.

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

#683

Post by jacurtis »

plaidfuji wrote: post #287

Surprised there’s no mention of Google Workspace here. I’ve been using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It’s obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and simple, and they’ve steadily closed the feature gap with Word, Excel and PPT. The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and plotting . If Google would take that produc…

In Corporate America there is an old saying that goes

> "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft Office".

Basically if you are the head of IT and you use Microsoft Office, the CEO comes to you and complains it is slow, you can say "Well Microsoft makes it slow". The CEO will shrug and move on. But if you instead get rid of microsoft and move the org to Google WOrkspace, then the CEO comes to you and says "Google Sheets doesn't have this one formula that I use" and you tell them that Google doesn't offer it, the CEO fires you for swithcing away from Microsoft Office.

Google Workspace is amazing. But Corporate IT departments just absolutely love paying their Microsoft enterprise subscriptions. So I have to use it for that reason.

Like you said, the office UI is horrible. I can't ever find anything. But in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, everything is exactly where I want it. I truly haven't ran into cases where Office products have something significant that Google's workspaces can't. I know there are differences, with office having some more advanced features but I think 99.5% of people don't ever use these advanced features.

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

#684

Post by zerkten »

Oleksa_dr wrote: post #624
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.

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’

>> they don't support system calls to dialog windows.

It's a little unclear what you mean exactly. Do you want the browsing experience changed for the system's file open/save dialogs? i.e. a third-party file explorer opens instead with all of it's features.

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

#685

Post by barrkel »

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.

Contemporary software was slow. You could tell you should consider more RAM when the HDD light and chugging noises told you it was swapping. But if you ran the same software with the benefit of 10 years of hardware improvement, it was not slow at all.

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

#686

Post by csdvrx »

neuroelectron wrote: post #576

Anyone else still using Office 2007? 2010 is ok too but I hate the ribbon. One of our clients still uses it though.

I use both: they are extremely fast - faster than Wordpad (on a native windows installation), much faster than libreoffice (on linux with wine).

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

#687

Post by chuckadams »

alyandon wrote: post #553
chuckadams wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, the GNOME folks are going to have to hire people to go door-to-door and take hardware away from people, because they won't have any software left to remove features from.

I've always joked about the eventual evolution of the GNOME desktop converging to a single login screen followed by a full screen button labeled LOGOFF because they will claim anything else is too confusing for their users.

And clicks the button for you, à la https://youtu.be/7OwgyrTnTRM?si=etU_Wk9sUJ-xPx3h

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

#688

Post by ok123456 »

justin66 wrote: post #518
bambax wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.

> I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island you've been living on since the war ended.

duckdb is doing fine.

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

#689

Post by hedora »

Illotus wrote: post #679
hedora wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse. CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh

The problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.

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

#690

Post by naikrovek »

trealira wrote: post #622
afavour wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.)

The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today.

I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of naively. The developers I support often simply are not thinking about the problem they're solving and they solve the problem in the simplest way (for them) and not the simplest way for a computer.

Software is an inefficiency amplifier, because the number of developers for a piece of code is much smaller than the number of computers that run that code; how much coal has been burned solely because of shitty implementations? I'd wager that the answer is "a LOT!"

Even if you don't care about coal usage, think about how much happier your users would be if your application was suddenly 5x faster than it was previously? now think of how many customers want their software to be slow (outside of TheDailyWTF): zero.

languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it. JS and Electron are great for developers, and horrible for users because of that amplification I described above.

I am dead tired of seeing hustle culture overtake everything in this field, and important things, to me, like quality and performance and support all fall straight down the toilet simply because executives want to release features faster.

things like copilot could help with this, i hope. presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would, though the existence of vibe coding sort of nulls that out probably.

one thing that AI will do quite soon is increase the amount of software that exists quite dramatically. and I am kinda concerned about the possibility that it's all going to suck horribly.

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