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

Post by Maxion » Thu, May 01, 2025, 7:41 PM UTC

kermatt wrote: post #591

jeroenhd wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives. I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process…

> software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans This sums up my entire experience of "Enterprise applications".

Post by efdee » Thu, May 01, 2025, 7:46 PM UTC

gloosx wrote: post #749

_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 clic…

Post by prussian » Thu, May 01, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

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.

    (Measure-Command { git status | Out-Null }).TotalSeconds

Post by zifpanachr23 » Thu, May 01, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #126

As someone who programs embedded systems the bloat people have grown to accept in the userspace is utterly mindbogling to me. Sure it is a challenge to write performant code, I know that as well as any other embedded programmer, but my feeling is that in userspace or web programming most people have stopped even trying to be performant. They will give you paginated content with 10 items per page, items whose data mak…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 01, 2025, 7:58 PM UTC

prussian wrote: post #815

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 think people forget that some of this software may be relatively fast. The problem is, most corporate environments are loaded up with EDRs and other strange anti-malware software that impede quick startup or speedy library calls. I've seen a misconfigured Forcepoint EDR rule block a window for 5 seconds on copy and paste from Chrome to Word. Another example: it takes ~2 seconds to run git on my work machine (Measur…