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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

#821

Post by magicalhippo »

PuppetSoup wrote: post #221
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

Not OP but for me it's a solid remote desktop alternative that can compete with Windows' remote desktop experience. There's been some movement there, so perhaps in 5 years time.

Also I really dislike how out of memory conditions just causes everything to grind to a halt for 5 minutes before something, typically Firefox, crashes. On Windows at least just Firefox gets very slow, but usually I can just nuke the process that eats too much memory. Not so on Linux as the whole desktop becomes unresponsive.

And every now and then I still need to fiddle with some config files or whatnot. Not game breaking but annoying.

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

#822

Post by mcswell »

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.

And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.

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

#823

Post by pete1302 »

ponector wrote: post #526
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #457

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. Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers. > LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases. Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mea…

We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did! On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.

I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.

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

#824

Post by godelski »

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…

People question why I use vim and live in the terminal. Well... because everything opens up instantly, and I can run email, spotify, my editor, debugger, pdf reader, file browser (with image previewing), and everything I need while using less than a gig of ram and barely any CPU usage. Not only that, but I get to make the things work in the way I want them to, not have to constantly hunt down random menus. If I'm ever confused I just press ? and 99% of the time find the answer faster than it takes to reach for the mouse. Even a shitty TUI usually is faster and easier to use than many GUIs. Yes, there are times GUIs are better. I don't want a TUI Gimp, but for a lot of stuff, I don't need the bloat.

It's because I don't like the Chinese torture you're referring to. We're programmers, we don't have to live that way.

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

#825

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

efdee wrote: post #813
gloosx wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like an AVG problem, not a Windows problem.

The very normalization of antivirus on Windows is a Windows problem. For better or worse, Mac users simply don't think about AV.

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

#828

Post by mcswell »

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.

Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how they functioned. In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-over. And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of the cases.

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

#829

Post by antod »

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…

Office 4.3 loading on Win3.1 was glacial. I haven't forgotten.

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

#830

Post by boringg »

jlarocco wrote: post #702
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.

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 performanc…

100% thought process is: why waste internal resources on speeding up software when the user has enough hardware to manage the workload.
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