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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

#751

Post by zahlman »

AnonHP wrote: post #387

I use LibreOffice for my personal needs, which is spreadsheets (I also donate to Document Foundation to support it). Sadly, even LibreOffice has suffered from being slow to start up, is bloated and sluggish (on Windows and macOS; I have tried it on Linux for a very long time). It seems like all Office-like apps are cursed to be slow and bloated. It also seems like 32GB should be the bare minimum amount of RAM for a W…

I've found arrow-key scrolling through a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet on Linux to be quite painful.

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

#752

Post by ralphc »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #490
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…

> 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…

How much modern security do I need to write & print a term paper or church bulletin on my own computer?

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

#753

Post by bitwize »

jeroenhd wrote: post #585
_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…

Microsoft's free web app office suite is a slimmed down, quick version of Office that does most of the stuff most users want most of the time, for the cases where Pages or Google Docs would also suffice. The alternative to the full office suite with decades of backwards compatibility and hundreds of features, is the quick, free version Microsoft made to fight off Google Docs.

We've reached peak bloat when the version of an app that lives in a fucking browser is "slimmed down" and "fast" compared to the real app.

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

#754

Post by p_ing »

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…

> 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.

Why? A good portion of programs are still single-threaded, and often that's the correct choice. Even in games a single-threaded main thread or logic thread may be the only choice. Where multi-threading makes sense it should be employed, but it's difficult to do well.

Otherwise, it's up to the OS to balance threads appropriately. All major OSes do this well today.

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

#755

Post by crazygringo »

resource_waste wrote: post #296
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…

I generally agree with what you said. My only issue is that it cannot handle lots of data. Both Docs and Sheets have caused limitations here. Docs gets unusably slow. Sheets just wont work.

Docs stopped getting slow at some point in the past few years.

It used to be a nightmare to edit a 150 page file. Now it's no problem at all.

Not sure if it has to do with migrating from HTML to canvas for rendering, or totally separate.

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

#756

Post by morning-coffee »

bborud wrote: post #487
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…

Most of what Microsoft does is indeed bafflingly bad. With a few exceptions. The baseline for software from Microsoft appears to be slow, bad UX and very buggy. And it isn't like this is some image thing; Microsoft products are always worse than I could remember when I'm confronted with them after some time away from them. Developers at Microsoft are obviously not rewarded for quality. You have to assume that this is…

> Developers at Microsoft are obviously not rewarded for quality.

I work at Microsoft and you're absolutely correct as far as I've observed. Rewards are for speed and doing things (usually hyped-based) that advance the goals of leadership... these goals are rarely if ever about "let's make sure we nail the basics first". I think it comes down to serving shareholders vs. serving real customers.

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

#757

Post by Nemo_bis »

Qem wrote: post #618
BarryMilo wrote: post #289

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. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

LibreOffice has dynamic tables, an equivalent to pivot tables, for many years already.

They're also just called "pivot tables" in some locales.

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

#758

Post by ambicapter »

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…

I really don't think we've "lost it", I think performance has just not been a consideration in the engineering of Office for a long time, if ever.

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

#759

Post by horsawlarway »

zwaps wrote: post #494
horsawlarway wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close. I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open. Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly c…

Never had an issue on Mac, never got it to work properly on a single of my many linux laptops

Try unplugging an external USB-C monitor while it's transitioning between states.

It won't come back up ok, as recently as 6 weeks ago.

Or the rampant reports of things like this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255642823?sortBy=rank

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

#760

Post by zero_bias »

zer00eyz wrote: post #738
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…

>> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can... The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the culture of product management. (Note: NOT product managers per se). I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of "add",…

> I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"?

Google goes a step further and kills entire apps

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