For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you’d think they’d be concerned about the climate impact of this and why their applications are so inefficient.
There's an old quote about "why would I pay to have the code written more efficiently when processors are constantly getting faster and harddrives are constantly getting bigger?" that always comes to mind about MS software. I don't know the validity of that quote to be any more accurate than the 640k memory one, but it always just had the feel of authenticity by everything you see as circumstantial evidence
The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer machines so it’s not part of their bottom line. They have little incentive to care as long as it’s not so slow their monopoly breaks.
Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.
It feels like they’ve always taken the approach: “Why rewrite anything when we can just add more virtualization?” In the short term, that might help ensure compatibility with older versions with minimal testing. But after 40-something years, it’s clear that it’s become a mountain of technical debt—one that Microsoft has no real plans to tackle any time soon.
The point of the virtue signaling is that it’s cheaper than actual virtue while retaining much of the same benefit. Practicing virtue signaling and not virtue is pretty natural.
They don't care about the climate impact. They care about the green washing PR. Probably decided that the cost of fixing this outweighs the potential PR benefit.
It's funny that they give you a whole Greenpeace lecture in the Settings app now about carbon footprint and how Microsoft is committed to lowering it and that you're a terrible person for having your brightness at 100%, but then spins around on this and shoves Office in boot...
I still can't believe how slow MS Word is to load a .docx document of about 150 pages of text, you can watch the page count in the status bar grow over a period of 10 seconds or more as it loads/paginates it.
On the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l
I often wish Word from around 2000 back. Back then the software was straightforward and did what it was supposed to do without much fuzz. And the speed on modern hardware would be crazy.
The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.
I'm more surprised that this is news than anything else.
If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.
What exactly does this mean given I definitely sit there staring at a loading / app launch screen when opening Excel if the app isn’t already opened. If it’s opened already, opening another file is much much faster.
Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.
> When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC — it will wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state. Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it will automatically disable itself.
If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this feature would be useless for them.
If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow. Why?
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted on windows.
Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.
Probably a corporate machine vs personal desktop divide. My corporate windows laptop has so much security/keylogger/spyware crap that time to unlock is ridiculous.
I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
I don’t like Windows. And it is baffling to me that startup speed is a figure-of-merit nowadays given how absurdly fast drives have gotten.
With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).
Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
Weirdly for me I don't have much trouble with startup, but shutting down windows seems to take an impossibly long time, especially on my work laptop. Like several minutes. Probably some misbehaving program and maybe not windows' fault, but I have no idea what it's doing just sitting there at the final screen after its killed all remaining tasks for eternity.
Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds, I have a similar samsung SSD and it takes like 20 seconds maximum from a cold boot to desktop on Win11
> Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds
Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.
Yeah my ~1000€ Lenovo Yoga 7 Pro takes 18 seconds from cold boot(power button press) to signed in via windows hello. And that's with Bitlocker and myself having installed a whole bunch of background utilities.
I think the way macOS and Windows loads stuff after login is a bit different though.
Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.
For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)
That would be an implementation deficiency. If Windows can be FDE and load faster than macOS, then the way macOS has implemented the FDE solution is suboptimal, if startup time is your primary measurement.
I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
The way File Vault works nowadays, as I understand it, is that your user data (and maybe even much of the OS) isn't decrypted until you've put in your password on the login screen. This means that even if you devised a way to hijack the login screen, or sniff the keys coming out of the secure enclave, you'd still be stuck without the user's login password.
Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the CPU.
I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable to load as much before the user can put in their password.
I don't know what is different on your system, but my Windows startup experience is that it's blazing fast. Granted, that's on a gaming rig with a decent CPU and it's Windows 10, not 11, but I don't remember having to do any custom de-shittification and it boots way faster than Linux, short enough to not really perceive the boot process as an interruption.
That's funny cuz my Linux boot up is so fast that multiple coworkers and even my girlfriend have commented on how much faster it is than their windows installs.
Linux is blazing fast when configured properly. But in reality we're talking about 2-3 seconds of difference here. How long a machine takes to POST is usually the biggest part of bootup nowadays.
Recently needed windows for a single piece of software (I hate myself for it) and used a PC I had around (dell Wyse 5070) manjaro Linux Bootet in about 9 seconds.
Windows 10 on the other hand takes nearly a minute to get to login and it hasn't stopped booting then, another 20 seconds or so after login it's not responsive.
And only if it doesn't decide to update or do system repairs for 5 minutes, or more if it goes into one if it's restart update loops.
It's not a little more, it literally killed at least an hour of productivity in just a few weeks
(That's not counting the productivity killers once the system is running)
From memory, Office 97 had that dedicated Office shortcut bar on the desktop that it inherited from Office 95, but that was more of a proto-Quick-Launch-bar than a startup accelerator. Though because the bar necessarily needed to load some Office DLLs from disk I can see how that would have given Word/Excel/etc a modest startup boost.
To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen.
I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup.
On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared.
These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.
'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet'
I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.
I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.
It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people discovered it started just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The secret was a special in-house linker but that was a trade secret until many years later, I think.
Back then there was much less understanding in the software industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an obviously successful move back then), combined with having some truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature.
Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any particularly unique killer features from the end user's perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and features only through very expensive proprietary hardware.
This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.
> The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.
That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux.
The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.
Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We’ll move the problem somewhere else.
I would like to know how we got to a place where any application taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in any way.
I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen?
All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important.
“CPU is cheap” — fuck you it is. If your application takes more than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around that thing even if it is dotnet.
Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance and customer productivity (think of these as “minimizing the amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer”) are paramount. PARAMOUNT! — that means they’re one of the, if not the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions.
Given that Office ran on my 486 and Word and Excel did everything back then that I still need them to do today, a slow startup time on modern hardware is ridiculous.
Office should be modular with a lean core and extensions for those who need them.
I wish libreoffice was better. I've tried replacing office with it and every time it has the weirdest stuff going on.
UI is clunky, importing/exporting office made docs is glitchy, and I've even run into actions that don't get pushed to the undo stack.
I know this stuff always gets slowly ironed out, and the devs are working really hard, but it's just a shame it's never been a viable alternative for so long.
I bought Softmaker Office last year. The Textmaker word processor is better than LibreOffice Writer. It's more MS Office compatible, so I don't get complaints about formatting issues from co-workers.
I moved to Linux and use real editors. Problem solved! /jk
Jokes aside, I did buy a 2019 dell latitude laptop, and it's an old CPU, but it's still amazed me how well it's working. The iGPU is aweful for anything 3d heavy (Gnome's compositor), but still good for anything else.
I also have an MBA and it's quite fast, but all those "you should do this the Apple way" is frustrating.
After a long look at my computing activities, I do not need much other than Emacs, Librewolf, and a video player. I still use the MBA for rare usage like Balsamiq and important video calls.
I've not had the greatest relationship with Apple software lately, however seeing every "great idea" that comes out of the Microsoft development team is quite possibly the only marketing Apple needs going forward.
I genuinely don't know if it was a bug or intentional behavior like TFA, but on the last win10 machine I used Edge would leave several of its background browser engine processes running indefinitely after the application was closed. Seems like they're just happy to let their users make unwitting sacrifices for their convenience of their devs.
Now I never understood why the chrome.exe's would hang out when I didn't install any "background apps" - anyway I suspect a similar setting in Edge is buried in there somewhere.
I have a vague recollection of that being related to embedded browsers in apps, and I think it was related to performance not child processes for unknown client apps.
Related, long ago I replaced the windows shell with hl.exe, so my computer booted straight into Half Life rather than explorer. With my one core system, it was a noticeable improvement.
I'm not sure what TFA or xi means, but any program you install can stay open in the background for quick launching. What makes you think microsoft has exclusive access to doing that?
This is one of the things that made people hate Vista. By default it was set to preload things into RAM in the background, gobbling up memory and potentially slowing the system down, both during the preload procedure and if you happened to want to run a program that the preload procedure didn't account for.
Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.
At the end, my windows 7 machine would take an hour to boot if I remember right because Windows used 100% of my hard drive to do god knows what. Windows 7 at the end was literally unusable without an ssd.
Fine with me. If 100% of my RAM isn't in use at all times for low priority speculative cache, then it's not doing what I want. So long as it frees up the RAM instantly the moment anything actually requests it.
At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported.
Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back.
Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?
Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
Not to be that guy, but at some point, if you ever decide that fighting a war with Microsoft to have control over your own computer and not be surveilled stops being worth it... linux. Yes, there's an upfront cost you pay to learn, and there are ongoing costs as defaults and tools change over the years.. but at least the relationship is not adversarial.
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 Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"
I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.
Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.
If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.
LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks.
Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.
LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).
Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes.
This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.
For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option.
On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years.
I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.
If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.
My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.
To be fair, office is also hot garbage. It's just that most people are used to that kind of hot garbage.
As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years, it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).
I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.
Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!
The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.
If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.
Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts?
That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.
> any training is strictly scoped to that workspace
Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.
Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.
There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.
We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end.
The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.
I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.
> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),
Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.
Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.
> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago
I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.
> poor performance
For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?
> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities
It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.
I was a hardcore desktop LibreOffice user both Calc and Write, but I have been using Write exclusively online through CollaboraOffice in a Nextcloud Instance and did not have any issue in two years. I know it was buggy before because I have been checked every two or three releases.
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.
Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).
Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif.
XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).
Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining.
And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
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 assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened.
I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.
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.
>; 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)
A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638
It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.
The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.
> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.
There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.
> 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.
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.
I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.
Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment.
The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.
I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.
Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.
“View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.
It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.
> I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit.
The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files.
Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.
It's a completely different format. Iirc .doc files are basically implementation defined files and consist of c-structs dumped to disk. .docx is a properly specified format of compressed xml.
It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage, which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was forced to write docs for Office file formats because of antitrust:
> The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.
That's actually not true, Office has had activation since XP (2002), so 2003 is included in that.
This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this:
> «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"»
Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.
In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution.
Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.
Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer.
It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop
I guess you already know, but you do not necessarily need a server for Syncthing if the devices are on at the same time. If they are not, a simple low-power rpi-like device would be more than enough to implement a star topology, with the pi being receive-only.
I used to always have an Office installation on my computer, whether it's pirated (many years ago)/using my personal license/using my school license/etc.
Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the installation. It was a long time before I discovered that I need any of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has worked out surprisingly well.
If you go the Syncthing-Route anyway, take a look at Softmaker Office [1], it's an almost-drop-in replacement for MS Office and would set you back 50 EUR/year for 5 devices.
We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for Nextcloud integration.
I’d recommend switching to Obsidian and never looking back. And unless you have additional software that requires windows, Linux is also a lower-stress compute experience these days.
I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.
Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I preload Emacs and Firefox.
Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.
(And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)
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
"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.
Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a while. We were working on a job-seeker / employer match-making application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints.
The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we slow down the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.
We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this
I have a habit of uninstalling any programs that take it upon themselves to start up on boot without me specifically requesting it. Any company with that little respect for the user isn’t one I want to be involved with.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadOn the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l
The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.
This is of course problematic if you receive documents from other users :(
If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.
Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for the average user.
If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
Oh btw every joke has a grain of truth (sigh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712108
For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my password.
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
Some hardware is MUCH slower than others.
Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting and not interacting with the windows partition?
And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good points.
Best just disable the feature.
Windows has alot of stuff that runs in sequence that takes awhile to churn or times out. It’s much better than it was, but Apple is way ahead.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).
Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.
Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.
For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)
I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the CPU.
I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable to load as much before the user can put in their password.
I see some people think they have fast booting windows PCs but I am sure also they know that's not the case for the average PC
Linux is blazing fast when configured properly. But in reality we're talking about 2-3 seconds of difference here. How long a machine takes to POST is usually the biggest part of bootup nowadays.
Windows 10 on the other hand takes nearly a minute to get to login and it hasn't stopped booting then, another 20 seconds or so after login it's not responsive.
And only if it doesn't decide to update or do system repairs for 5 minutes, or more if it goes into one if it's restart update loops.
It's not a little more, it literally killed at least an hour of productivity in just a few weeks
(That's not counting the productivity killers once the system is running)
I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup.
On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared.
These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.
'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet'
I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.
Granted, this is all Hard Work. I understand that. But it's the right thing to do.
Back then there was much less understanding in the software industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an obviously successful move back then), combined with having some truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature.
Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any particularly unique killer features from the end user's perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and features only through very expensive proprietary hardware.
This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.
https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K...
> The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.
The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.
Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We’ll move the problem somewhere else.
I would like to know how we got to a place where any application taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in any way.
I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen?
All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important.
“CPU is cheap” — fuck you it is. If your application takes more than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around that thing even if it is dotnet.
Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance and customer productivity (think of these as “minimizing the amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer”) are paramount. PARAMOUNT! — that means they’re one of the, if not the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions.
This world is going to shit so fecking fast
Office should be modular with a lean core and extensions for those who need them.
UI is clunky, importing/exporting office made docs is glitchy, and I've even run into actions that don't get pushed to the undo stack.
I know this stuff always gets slowly ironed out, and the devs are working really hard, but it's just a shame it's never been a viable alternative for so long.
Jokes aside, I did buy a 2019 dell latitude laptop, and it's an old CPU, but it's still amazed me how well it's working. The iGPU is aweful for anything 3d heavy (Gnome's compositor), but still good for anything else.
I also have an MBA and it's quite fast, but all those "you should do this the Apple way" is frustrating.
After a long look at my computing activities, I do not need much other than Emacs, Librewolf, and a video player. I still use the MBA for rare usage like Balsamiq and important video calls.
I wonder if it even matters though. Corporations are always going to use it, and the cheapest laptops will always come with it.
https://superuser.com/questions/269385/why-does-google-chrom...
Now I never understood why the chrome.exe's would hang out when I didn't install any "background apps" - anyway I suspect a similar setting in Edge is buried in there somewhere.
[1] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/167068-how-enable-disabl...
[2] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/160140-disable-continue-...
Where did you saw that?
Many such cases.
Management: Tweak prefetch and call it a new feature.
Dev1: Superfetch!
Dev2: We already did that.
Dev1: Superfetch for Office!
Management: Yes.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-right-gentlemen
https://windowsground.com/what-is-superfetch-windows-10-shou...
Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.
The worst offender by far is Outlook (which isn't really MSO but looks like it is, or is it?)
Against an on prem Exchange, I get way better performance from Evolution (Linux) than Outlook (Windows).
Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back.
Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?
On my Mac, I can't find any kind of launch item or background process. Chrome doesn't launch anything until I launch Chrome.
Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"
I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.
If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.
Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ
On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years.
I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.
If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.
As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years, it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).
I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office look.
Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0
Very much seems like a matter of preference.
If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.
Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.
What blows my mind is how dreadful search is in Google docs. The thing that should be really good is really bad.
Strange days
We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_...
[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...
Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.
Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.
> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago
I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.
> poor performance
For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?
> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities
It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.
LibreOffice isn't written in Java. It can optionally use Java for extensions and for some database reporting features: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/015
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors
I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.
XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).
Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
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 assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened.
I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.
A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638
It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.
The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.
> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.
There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.
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.
The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.
I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.
The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files.
Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
That's actually not true, Office has had activation since XP (2002), so 2003 is included in that.
I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.
> «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"»
Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.
Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.
It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop
However: raising concerns is a bad career move apparently. These ideas... aren't proposed by devs; if that makes sense.
Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the installation. It was a long time before I discovered that I need any of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has worked out surprisingly well.
We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for Nextcloud integration.
[1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.
Download microsoft autoruns from their site to turn off everything that runs when windows start to do away with all the crap.
Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.
(And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)
To instantly find any file anywhere, nice productivity boost (among many)
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.
The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we slow down the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.
We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this