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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#852Earlier 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.
> 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…
Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance, often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization application. It's used as a database and application engine.
This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and safe.
Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should be switched out to a proper application with a proper database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries could do that. They better figure it out. Because these existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
We stopped developing for users/customers and instead added layers to make developer lives easier. Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!
> Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?! Have you seen the state of pretty much every non-js UX framework? That's why. JS/css/html won the UX domain in a way that no other language comes close to. If you look at the most recent most modern UX frameworks, they are often just half implemented poor mimics of the js/css/html stack with approximately 0 devs writing new 3rd party extensions. Intellij uses…
Call me an idiot, but I still gladly take Swing and javafx over JS and monstrosities like react. The state of Qt is also very good. Web won because the distribution model is easier on the user, and because managers thought UX designers would be making whole apps now, saving on rates. Not because it's technically superior.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#854Windows 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…
this is like a word-for-word repeat of a comment that i've seen probably 1,000 times in my career. > never gotten bluetooth to work on windows I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I know. > apps randomly crash true of any operating system, also that's not what "randomly" means. you mean "unexpectedly" I think. > settings pages crash never ha…
> I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I know.
I have about a 50% success rate with Bluetooth devices pairing and reconnecting properly on Windows, so at least I’m doing better than OP.
The Bluetooth software stack on the whole is a disaster, but the only platform where I’ve had a trouble free experience is macOS.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.
Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple
You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#856Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The problem with Electron is that business-wise it is an excellent decision. You can get by with a few people to wrap the web app and integrate it with the OS, and then get updates pretty much for free.
Yet for the user it is bad -- bloated, slow, feels non-native, has specific bugs which are hard to address for the devs, etc.
I don't see any light for the desktop UI development unless there is some lightweight universal rendering engine. Tauri with WebView is somewhat promising, but it has problems on Linux and it is hard to target older systems.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#857Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.
What’s infuriating is, `find` and `grep` are snappy, they find everything you need in microseconds per gigabyte, and they have no index! If the macOS or Windows searches were just wrappers for find/grep, it would already be an improvement!
On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.
Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.
There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#859Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols. I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of as…
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.
If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features because they like bloated software; they add features because the market demands them, and the market demanded support for more than 65,535 rows.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Battery use is a pretty big concern these days; also, some users like running several things at the same time.