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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

#701

Post by johnklos »

Imagine explaining this to someome in 1995:

"In thirty years our computers will have sixteen threads of execution at 4.5 GHz each, with 4 IPC or better, along with 16 gigabytes of memory that can move data at 50 gigabytes a second. Practically everyone will have solid state storage that loads and saves at more than a gigabyte per second. Many computers will have GPUs capable of beating the fastest supercomputers in the 1995 world, and most of that capacity will be used for little more than just pushing pixels to a monitor."

"Wow! I bet Microsoft Word will load instantly!"

"No. It'll take longer to load than Word 5.1 takes to load on an Amiga with an '060 accelerator running ShapeShifter. It'll be so slow that Microsoft decides to load key parts of Office when the system boots, but only if you have more RAM than can be directly accessed by a 32 bit processor."

It's something you'd expect from a snarky article from The Register or from me, if you know me, but I think both El Reg and I wouldn't've quite gotten the full extent of it.

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

#702

Post by jlarocco »

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.

Because an entire generation of developers and their managers believe the hardware is so fast there's no point trying to optimize the software.

Besides, the only thing that matters is getting tickets "done" before the arbitrary sprint deadline in 2 weeks, so best not to spend any extra time cleaning up or optimizing the first thing that works. You can't think about performance until the sprint dedicated to performance.

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

#703

Post by allears »

Illotus wrote: post #638
SoftTalker wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.

Anecdotal evidence from myself: Although I've been using Word for many decades, I've never had much "muscle memory" in terms of accessing features. It was always a case of learning which pulldown menu held the required function.

When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability" went out the window. Functions were grouped according to some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to. Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like Illustrator.

Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only person who actually likes the ribbon.

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

#704

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Personally, I live the Office license my workplace pays for untouched, and use LibreOffice on my work Windows computer instead.

Yes, it's slow and bloated. But it's comparably faster and leaner, and it doesn't use undocumented APIs to take resources away from everything else running on the same computer and make every other thing unusable.

And yeah, calc lacks features when compared to excel. So, avoid spreadsheets for complex problems.

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

#705

Post by carlosjobim »

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.

They just purchased Pixelmator ;)

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

#706

Post by naikrovek »

deburo wrote: post #621
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.

what kills me about things like this is if you load a 1-2 decade old version of office on a computer today, things are fast.

all they had to do was keep up with whatever features are different in excel between now and then and implement those. leaving the menus and UX mostly alone, only improving things as time went on. update the engine to do the new features, and update the UI only enough to expose the new features and make them accessible.

but no... UX people don't have jobs if they can't redesign shit for no obvious reason. PMs don't have jobs if they can't force nonsense features no one ever asked for. Developers don't have jobs if they don't aggressively chase every new fad and tool and be in a constant state of learning (and thus unlearning).

this whole world is stupid and was a mistake.

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

#707

Post by reaperducer »

mapt wrote: post #648
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…

I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed. That means this compressed binary you're handing me is around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a novel is faster than writing/testing…

install a couple 150MB IDEs

Not Java, but an IDE in 4K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming

Having used it quite extensively (Well, five solid days over two weeks, which is about 1000x longer than most people gargling on the internet), it's surprisingly capable.

Imagine if someone with the same talent and motivation was working on today's hardware.

Someone on Atari Age wrote a LISP for the same machine.

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

#708

Post by SoftTalker »

Illotus wrote: post #638
SoftTalker wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.

I find its discoverability is terrible. I am always hunting for what I want to do and it's never anywhere that seems to me to be sensible. I usually end up doing a google search for what I want. Perusing the ribbon takes me much more time than just looking at the various options under the old style menus.

Also traditional menus had some traditional standards. Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across applications.

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

#709

Post by bradley13 »

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.

Cruft built on frameworks using libraries with a zillion dependencies, some of which are cruft built on frameworks...

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

#710

Post by libraryatnight »

Dude, the only thing keeping me on Windows is Ableton. Can one of you super hackers go get a job there and port Ableton to Linux, plase? (it's not great through Wine) I'd go with bitwig but I have a push device and it's super cool. Tauntingly, Push runs a Linux Ableton variant in standalone mode, I've read. They're mocking me.

I'm so sick of Windows.When Elon took over twitter and you stopped being able to say anything, I was banned because I told Microsoft I hate them and I hope they burn - I'd just received an update that forced some bullshit on me and it inconvenienced my personal and work life, I felt they needed told they suck.

I don't miss twitter at all, I still hope Microsoft burns.

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