6 ms·

Alas, it doesn't have Excel on it. I want to test my theory that Excel 5 in an old mac emulator would be more snappy for basic input tasks than Excel 16 native

by dilap 6y ago

Alas, it doesn't have Excel on it. I want to test my theory that Excel 5 in an old mac emulator would be more snappy for basic input tasks than Excel 16 native on a MBP.

guerrilla 6y ago
Looks like you either get the German version or an alpha 5.0 version [1]. [1]. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x
balaksakrionon 6y ago
On the bright side we may be saved from just such an infuriating realization
ebg13 6y ago
I have a theory that modern Excel forces the display to redraw too much. It's the only thing I can think of that would cause my 2018 MBP CPU to peg at 100% while (jankily) resizing the window on my external monitor unless I play games with the OS resolution settings to disable retina upscaling.
- orbitingpluto 6y ago
  As soon as you start to vary, accidentally or not, the heights of cells, you're in for a bad time. Sorting large datasets with varying cell heights will bog down your system. Force uniform cell height and sorting can easily be twenty times quicker.
  - tbrock 6y ago
    That seems like a bug right? The drawing code might be highly optimized for equal height rows but resizing cells is quite common, I’m surprised they just punt on it.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      IIRC redraw doesn't happen until the sort finishes, but I use Excel as little as I can get away with, so I don't have a recent memory to rely on. That said, at a guess, reordering rows of equal height (and otherwise with no non-default properties) is probably mostly just rearranging pointers - why bother keeping row index associations intact, when the only trait of any row is the values in its cells? - while reordering rows of varying height might involve a lot of copying, or otherwise significantly more complex shenanigans, to make sure data and row properties stay properly associated.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    I'm not even talking about varying heights of cells, just resizing the window. It. jumps. and. jerks. and. crawls. and. chugs. Even if it's a fresh blank sheet. And the problem gets noticeably and rapidly worse the bigger the window is, so if I want to fullscreen a sheet on a big monitor...oof. It's like the application completely reconstructs the whole visual canvas from scratch any time you do anything, whether it makes sense or not. This doesn't happen with any other application. Hiding the ribbon makes a _huge_ difference. That's hilarious and awful.
snazz 6y ago
I feel like old stuff always feels way slower than I remembered when I revisit it years later. I couldn't believe how slow of an iPhone I lived with when I booted my old one up recently. Plus, most of modern Excel's apparent slowness comes from the animated text input and the animations between cells in the spreadsheet. I think that the text animations could be safely removed, but animations that give users a sense of relativity on the 2D plane when they make movements are very useful for UX.
jonpurdy 6y ago
As someone who regularly uses old Mac emulators on modern hardware, most programs are hundreds of times faster (despite emulation overhead). As someone who regularly uses an actual old PowerBook 2400 from 1997 for fun, I can say that Photoshop 4 is by far snappier on that than the latest Photoshop CS on my MacBook Pro...
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  This is depressing, but hardly surprising. The dedication to "just ship it" has really built up. The market pressure to build efficient software approaches zero. All software will approach "human speed," whether it's adding two integers or getting near instant predictions from a GAN. All available resources will be used until it's "good enough. Just ship it," and efficiencies will multiple as in any natural selection: defensive measures like "confusing code," and "unrelated system fails when this one is changed" allowing mostly harmless dumb code to survive and propagate. Some intrepid learner comes to study the code one day. "Huh, I guess this is how you're supposed to do it. Seems kinda weird but I'm sure it was written this way for a reason. It's been like this for a decade!" And so they copy the procedure into their greenfield project. Efficient code will always be sacrificed to the god of "Just Ship It" as long as the overall performance is "Good enough." And why not?
  - cenal 6y ago
    What’s depressing is the de-evolution of Evernote performance. Every year it seems to get worse.
  - simias 6y ago
    >This is depressing Only if you really have to use modern software (which, admittedly, we all have to from time to time). Vim, my terminal, grep and GCC are faster than ever! To really enjoy computers the trick is to run old software on modern hardware.
felixrieseberg 6y ago
It's worth a try ;-) https://www.macintoshrepository.org/195-microsoft-excel-1-03-1-06-1-5-2-2a-3-0a-4-0-5-0a https://www.macintoshrepository.org/195-microsoft-excel-1-03...

by dilap 6y ago

Alas, it doesn't have Excel on it. I want to test my theory that Excel 5 in an old mac emulator would be more snappy for basic input tasks than Excel 16 native on a MBP.

guerrilla 6y ago

Looks like you either get the German version or an alpha 5.0 version [1]. [1]. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x

balaksakrionon 6y ago

On the bright side we may be saved from just such an infuriating realization

ebg13 6y ago

I have a theory that modern Excel forces the display to redraw too much. It's the only thing I can think of that would cause my 2018 MBP CPU to peg at 100% while (jankily) resizing the window on my external monitor unless I play games with the OS resolution settings to disable retina upscaling.

orbitingpluto 6y ago
As soon as you start to vary, accidentally or not, the heights of cells, you're in for a bad time. Sorting large datasets with varying cell heights will bog down your system. Force uniform cell height and sorting can easily be twenty times quicker.
- tbrock 6y ago
  That seems like a bug right? The drawing code might be highly optimized for equal height rows but resizing cells is quite common, I’m surprised they just punt on it.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    IIRC redraw doesn't happen until the sort finishes, but I use Excel as little as I can get away with, so I don't have a recent memory to rely on. That said, at a guess, reordering rows of equal height (and otherwise with no non-default properties) is probably mostly just rearranging pointers - why bother keeping row index associations intact, when the only trait of any row is the values in its cells? - while reordering rows of varying height might involve a lot of copying, or otherwise significantly more complex shenanigans, to make sure data and row properties stay properly associated.
- ebg13 6y ago
  I'm not even talking about varying heights of cells, just resizing the window. It. jumps. and. jerks. and. crawls. and. chugs. Even if it's a fresh blank sheet. And the problem gets noticeably and rapidly worse the bigger the window is, so if I want to fullscreen a sheet on a big monitor...oof. It's like the application completely reconstructs the whole visual canvas from scratch any time you do anything, whether it makes sense or not. This doesn't happen with any other application. Hiding the ribbon makes a _huge_ difference. That's hilarious and awful.

snazz 6y ago

I feel like old stuff always feels way slower than I remembered when I revisit it years later. I couldn't believe how slow of an iPhone I lived with when I booted my old one up recently. Plus, most of modern Excel's apparent slowness comes from the animated text input and the animations between cells in the spreadsheet. I think that the text animations could be safely removed, but animations that give users a sense of relativity on the 2D plane when they make movements are very useful for UX.

jonpurdy 6y ago

As someone who regularly uses old Mac emulators on modern hardware, most programs are hundreds of times faster (despite emulation overhead). As someone who regularly uses an actual old PowerBook 2400 from 1997 for fun, I can say that Photoshop 4 is by far snappier on that than the latest Photoshop CS on my MacBook Pro...

IggleSniggle 6y ago
This is depressing, but hardly surprising. The dedication to "just ship it" has really built up. The market pressure to build efficient software approaches zero. All software will approach "human speed," whether it's adding two integers or getting near instant predictions from a GAN. All available resources will be used until it's "good enough. Just ship it," and efficiencies will multiple as in any natural selection: defensive measures like "confusing code," and "unrelated system fails when this one is changed" allowing mostly harmless dumb code to survive and propagate. Some intrepid learner comes to study the code one day. "Huh, I guess this is how you're supposed to do it. Seems kinda weird but I'm sure it was written this way for a reason. It's been like this for a decade!" And so they copy the procedure into their greenfield project. Efficient code will always be sacrificed to the god of "Just Ship It" as long as the overall performance is "Good enough." And why not?
- cenal 6y ago
  What’s depressing is the de-evolution of Evernote performance. Every year it seems to get worse.
- simias 6y ago
  >This is depressing Only if you really have to use modern software (which, admittedly, we all have to from time to time). Vim, my terminal, grep and GCC are faster than ever! To really enjoy computers the trick is to run old software on modern hardware.

felixrieseberg 6y ago

It's worth a try ;-) https://www.macintoshrepository.org/195-microsoft-excel-1-03-1-06-1-5-2-2a-3-0a-4-0-5-0a https://www.macintoshrepository.org/195-microsoft-excel-1-03...