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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

#911

Post by max51 »

EFreethought wrote: post #889
brainzap wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its sad because using Excel for quick decision making can be a super power, these days I use apple numbers

> "using Excel for quick decision making" Could you expand on that?

not op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel. Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes.

Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.

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

#912

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #132
mrandish wrote: post #50

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the O…

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

[deleted]

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

#913

Post by etruong42 »

trealira wrote: post #622
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…

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 seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more

The cynical spin I would put on this idea is that software performs as poorly as it can get away with. MSFT is feeling the need/pressure to have Office load faster, and they will try to get away with preloading it.

Otherwise, there is a strong pull towards bloat that different people will try to take credit for as features even if the cumulative experience of all these "features" is actually a worse user-experience.

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

#914

Post by etruong42 »

aylmao wrote: post #896
nextos wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces. If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc. There's too much change for the sake of change.

> There's too much change for the sake of change. +1 to this. Like a lot of issues, I think the root is ideological, but this one in particular very clearly manifests organizationally. The companies building everyday software are ever bigger— full of software engineers, designers and various kinds of managers who are asked to justify their generous salaries. At an individual level I'm sure there's all sorts of cases,…

This is exactly what I see as well.

At a general level, I believe there are other options - changes/features need to meet some level of usage or it is scrapped out of recognition that supporting all these features make bugs more likely, performance likely to degrade, increase difficulty of adding features, make the product more difficult to use, etc.

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

#915

Post by sgarland »

DrillShopper wrote: post #414
sgarland wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: >> gsd > gnome-settings-daemon. >> no-longer > Don't think that's in the OED >> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than editing logind.conf > I don't like the tone in this sentence. I am dumbstruck that someone can be so utterly full of themselves that they can smugly correct someone’s grammar, and an obvious acronym, only to turn around and clutch their pearls that their victim sa…

That exchange is what happens when CADT and therapy language collide head first.

Not familiar with CADT, and Google wasn't any help for anything that seemed relevant.

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

#916

Post by goalieca »

const_cast wrote: post #866
efdee wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had to run a debloater on my system Hot take: your ""debloater"" screwed up your system. I've had problems with Windows, but none of the ones you've described. > For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay. I guess this describes my Windows experience. I _know_ some people have problems. I don't, because I guess either I got used to it or I know how to avoid it.

Windows kind of has this property where it rots. Both in time between reboots and in time in general. Running Windows 1+ week without a reboot and it just... gets a little more buggy and a little more slow each day. And then after a few years, it's time for a reinstall.

Windows rot used to mean periodically reformatting. With WinMe you had 1 month. With XP I found it unbearable around 9 months.

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

#917

Post by nine_k »

eviks wrote: post #625
_Algernon_ wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Windows isn't exactly known for the quality of it's search. It becoming consistently worse with every Windows version has been a meme for at more than a decade.

But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows search

> "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows.

Well, on Linux I have `locate` and `fd` which work really well, doing that very thing, and `ripgrep` does even more.

I heard something built-in is also shipped with macOS, it's called something like "Spotlight".

OTOH MS Excel for Windows is one and only, the macOS version barely holds a candle to it, and analogs are even further away.

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

#918

Post by eviks »

nine_k wrote: post #917
eviks wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Windows is know for a lot of productivity apps other platforms lack. I meant the Everything file search app (doesn't exist on Linux/Mac), not the default Windows search

> "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows. Well, on Linux I have `locate` and `fd` which work really well, doing that very thing, and `ripgrep` does even more. I heard something built-in is also shipped with macOS, it's called something like "Spotlight". OTOH MS Excel for Windows is one and only, the macOS version barely holds a candle to it, and analogs are even further away.

"that very thing" was instant and anywhere (not your irrelevant generic description), which your suggested tools can't do. You're just content with a poor cli substitute.

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

#919

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

The thing is, Google's word processor tool (whatever it is called now) is a children's toy, compared to proper word processing software. It doesn't even have proper styles and direct formatting rules the minds of people using it.

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

#920

Post by godelski »

DecentShoes wrote: post #892
godelski wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

How are you doing Spotify?

I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library

Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work

[0] https://github.com/aome510/spotify-player

[1] https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.

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