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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

#801

Post by TinkersW »

BarryMilo wrote: post #289
jeroenhd wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.

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.

I tried using LibreOffice on Windows, and it was super slow and kept crashing. It is also so ugly & annoying to use that it must be intentional.

I really don't understand how this market is dominated by an abusive platform(MS Office) & a broken POS(LibreOffice).

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

#802

Post by 90s_dev »

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…

> we've lost the art of software engineering

Yes! This is what all my projects are geared towards restoring. The big one is not quite ready to announce yet, but I am very proud of it, and extremely excited to release it, to solve exactly that: it makes engineering fun again!

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

#803

Post by josephernest »

barrkel wrote: post #328
amiga386 wrote: post #241

What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: htt…

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 still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.

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

#804

Post by ralphc »

hedora wrote: post #640
jonhohle wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <=…

Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language.

It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer

You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.

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

#805

Post by ryandrake »

MisterTea wrote: post #697
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 know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. Indeed. I am sure many of us here are burnt out on bloat. I am also sure many of us want to move to smaller stuff but cant simply because of industry momentum. BUT that doesn't mean the dream is dead, only that we must work towards those goals on our own time. I found Plan 9 and haven't looked back. I can…

And just when we think we can't make software any more inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app! And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with the application.

I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.

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

#806

Post by PJDK »

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.

So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.

We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the class was over!

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

#807

Post by bambax »

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.

I don't want to be rescued.

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

#809

Post by rochak »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #724
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…

For Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while editing.

Why does a user need to know and do this to get a just bearable experience? Has the bar gotten so low?

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

#810

Post by Nevermark »

ppenenko wrote: post #789
naikrovek wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I commiserate with your frustration with developers writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C issue. Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster, more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was much better on architecture, algorithms and multithreading than VS with its C++ and…

> Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.

Let’s normalize speed over time like we do dollars, so we are talking about the same thing.

Given the enormous multiplier in CPU and storage hardware speeds and parallelism today vs. say 1995, any “slow” application then should be indistinguishable from instant today.

“Slow” in the 90’s vs. “Slow” in 2025 are essentially different words. Given unclarified co-use pushes several orders magnitude of either speed or inefficiency difference under the rug.

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