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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

#741

Post by riskable »

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…

> Snipping Tool only works half the time.

This started happening to me too like six months ago. I figured, "yet again they broke something with an update, but it'll probably fix itself eventually."

Nope!

I'd switch to some 3rd party tool but my employer doesn't allow any since we all got upgraded to Windows 11. Why don't they allow it anymore? Because the snipping tool (Snip & Sketch).

At least they still let me install Ditto (I never liked how the Windows clipboard history feature works... No, I'll paste when I want to paste—not when I select the item!)

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

#742

Post by bflesch »

noisy_boy wrote: post #401
bflesch wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc). Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.

It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes. This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for ove…

Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface: https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1

Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ

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

#743

Post by osigurdson »

zahlman wrote: post #721
osigurdson wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I've heard people say things like "it is slow because it is not C++". When, in reality, the problem was I/O and N^2 algos.

I've been trying to impress upon people from my own research in Python packaging: Pip is slow because it defaults to pre-compiling bytecode (and doesn't invoke multiprocessing for that, although this seems to be in the works from the discussion I've seen); imports literally hundreds of modules even when it ultimately does nothing; creates complex wrappers to set up for connecting to the Internet (and using SSH, of co…

There may be a bit of culture at play sometimes as well. If a language isn't meant to be fast, then perhaps devs using the language do not prioritize performance very much. For some, as long as it is possible to point to some externality ("hey this is Python, what do you expect") this is sufficient.

Of course, not always the case. C++ is a good counter example with a massive range of performance "orientedness". On the other hand, I suspect there are few Rust / Zig or C programmers that don't care about performance.

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

#744

Post by njarboe »

naikrovek wrote: post #690
trealira wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My standard is that software should appear to work instantly to me, a human. Then it is fast enough. No pressing a button and waiting. That would be great.

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

#745

Post by kuekacang »

jacurtis wrote: post #675

I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the worst contender. Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my computer. But if I bo…

It seems like it would be more stable to run windows office under wine instead.

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

#746

Post by _ah »

Wow, this takes me back.

I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster.

That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstraction or graphics object is actually the reason everything is worse, and it's even more challenging when there's no direct impact- just a broad increase in system memory pressure.

Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.

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

#747

Post by p_ing »

mike_hearn wrote: post #713
p_ing wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this rumour stuff from. https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K... > The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.

That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux. The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.

Was it not obvious from what I posted that it didn't load the "entire" application? These solutions generally don't do that.

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

#748

Post by nikanj »

_ah wrote: post #746

Wow, this takes me back. I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster. That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstractio…

And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design phase, people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card. As if you could design and build a Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V

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

#749

Post by gloosx »

_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'm a Macbook user, but I often have screen sharing experiences with people using Windows laptops, god, it's painful watching them. Brand new, solid book with decent specs, only used for few months and everything is visibly very slow. Opening some documents and presentations while being on screen share takes minutes, file explorer lags, screen compositor lags. Notifications with weather, STOCKS info, murders and clickbait news around just pop up mid-conferences.

The most funny part? I was debugging application .exe not starting. Reason? AVG antivirus UPLOADED EXE to their server for EXAMINATION. EXE with an 600$ Extended Validation license. There was a message for the user TO WAIT FEW HOURS before they studied it and exe could be unblocked from launching. All was completely normal to the said windows user. What a dystopian thing they are used to

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

#750

Post by nikanj »

9dev wrote: post #440
brobdingnagians wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse. Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.

I’d be happy if it catered to exactly one edge case: ”Show me all emails that contain this word”
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