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I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done. Since then it seems they crammed mo
by spaetzleesser 5y ago
I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done.
Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent" functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess. When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time. Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are pushing OneDrive.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoI'd say 2003 is the last best version. It's the last version without ribbon and it is able to support OOXML with an addon. The UI experiments like partially hidden menus are all disableable if you don't want them.
- vikingerik 5y agoYeah, Office 2003 is the sweet spot. It's also the last version that installs entirely offline, without any attempts to sign in or phone home for verification.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoOffice 2003 has usage telemetry, and was apparently quite useful when they were making Office 2007, because they knew what people actually used and how often.
- yuhong 5y agoOffice 2003 was one of the first MS products to contain SQM/CEIP. Part of the reason I wrote about CompatTelRunner and Appraiser (in Windows) is that no other MS product has telemetry this horrible. This telemetry consumes CPU and HDD/SSD time to even collect the data.
- akoster 5y agoI concur except conveniently the Office 2007 compatibility pack is fully compatible with Office 2000. Microsoft took their page down but here is a mirror at download.com [1] and from this Stack Exchangw thread [2] [1] https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Office-Compatibility-Pack-for-Word-Excel-and-PowerPoint-File-Formats/3000-18483_4-10648733.html https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Office-Compatibility-Pac... [2] https://superuser.com/questions/404902/microsoft-office-compatibility-pack-the-converter-failed-to-open-the-file-erro https://superuser.com/questions/404902/microsoft-office-comp...
- jonhohle 5y agoCompletely agree. Office 2000 and Windows 2000 are probably my favorite Microsoft software of all time. They performed well on mid-range hardware (I ran them on Pentium II and III), were the best they’ve looked (imho), and let you get things done. For a long time I installed Windows 2000 in VMs for running older games and software, even into the Vista days. I would accept arguments that Office peaked between Word 6 and ‘98, but everything after Windows and Office 2000 were worse. XP’s Luna was an ugly reaction to OS X’s Aqua. Things kept getting slower and larger for no obvious addition of functionality. I’ve long since left Windows behind, but still have found memories of Microsoft circa 2000.
- bluedino 5y agoA big part of this is mentioned in the article: > The biggest competition for Office 2000 was . . . Office 97. > We were so heads down finishing Office 2000 that we didn’t realize how well received, and how good, Office 97 was. They had to keep introducing new shit to get people to upgrade. If your feature was the hot new feature, you got promoted. So everyone wanted to get their pet feature in, and the users lost.
- jankotek 5y agoWin95 had very strict and consistent UI style. Office2k and Win2k were peak of this consistency. After that came WinXP and mismatch of inconsistent UI styles.
- Someone1234 5y agoI've had to teach people to use PCs many times, it used to be so much easier for this reason. You'd teach someone that "this icon mean THIS" and that would be that, but today that is impossible because there are five different graphics/ideas for each thing (plus of course iconography used to use analogies from real-life, like a pen for Word, bin for throwing stuff away, folders, etc). Windows 10 never really reached self-consistency in six years, and it seems like Microsoft just doesn't care at this point with Windows 11 now just layering more contradictory concepts on the unfinished Windows 10 ones.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoIts to the point where I'd rather have text than icons in the various menus.
- endgame 5y agoLook at old pictures of (say) Netscape Navigator. Despite having far fewer pixels we somehow had enough to label our icons. What went wrong?
- vb6sp6 5y agoGlobalization happened English "250 views" = 8 chars wide German "250 mal angesehen" = 17 chars wide English "FAQ" = 3 chars wide Portuguese "Perguntas freqüentes" = 20 characters wide It isn't uncommon for english words to expand 200-300% when translated to other languages. I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version of netscape to see how they fit those labels
- 5y ago
- causality0 5y agoSaving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are pushing OneDrive. Christ don't remind me. The galaxy-brains at my work decided every file on every PC needs to go into OneDrive on a constant-update basis. Between the fact we're still stuck using HDDs instead of SSDs and our network hitting 16 megabits per second on a good day, most people have managed to get an impressive amount of reading done while waiting for their PCs to do anything at all.
- Arrath 5y agoWe were recently notified that external USB storage will soon be banned, and to use OneDrive to transfer files. My question to IT of "Hey we have clients that explicitly only allow the use of their own (incredibly terrible) file transfer platform, and block OneDrive. We've been burning stuff to CD with a usb drive and hand delivering it, if you ban those wat do?" Got the form "this is how you use OneDrive" response back. Love it.
- miohtama 5y agoSounds like an organizational issue in your work place. Usually these are the best dealt by changing the employer. They rarely get fixed from within the organization itself.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThrowing a fit while the VP is around often helps :). It always amazes me how quickly things get done when the guy who controls the budget wants something.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoMaking it impossible to work with clients also tends to lead to the loss of those clients and as a result changing one's employer due to the employer no longer existing :) This includes the VPs in question so usually these things get fixed before it gets that far though. But not before everyone else in the org has had a chance to practice their facepalm skills though. In other words I feel your pain :)
- abraxas 5y ago> When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6/Word97). The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt they'd be where they are now in terms of market penetration.
- int_19h 5y agoThe native Word file format is so complicated because it was basically a filesystem in a file, designed for extensibility scenarios such as embedding documents into other documents via OLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage
- mananaysiempre 5y agoThe structured storage part isn’t the problem, because Word doesn’t actually use it much except when you use OLE (the seemingly builtin things that use OLE are images, the abominable Equation, and maybe WordArt). IIRC the Word 97 format is essentially the previous Word format (whatever it was called) changed to use UCS-2 throughout, packed into a single stream in OLE storage, plus a bit of frills such as \005SummaryInformation. (This is to be compared with e.g. OOXML spreadsheets, which go as far as to store the sheets of cells and the strings inside those cells in two completely different entries of the ZIP container.) Everything that a Word document is maps 1:1 to a relatively straightforward string-of-bytes RTF. (With, again, the exception of OLE, which is why WordPad can write stuff that it assigns a .DOC suffix but is in fact an RTF stuffed into structured storage.) In fact, there was a piece of Microsoft software called the WinWord Converter SDK (Q111716) that used RTF as an intermediate format and had a bunch of DLLs that could read and write other formats; a compatible set of DLLs shipped with Windows and supported WordPad, and a larger one shipped with Word proper and contained all of its foreign format support. However, if you look at that perfectly innocent, easily parseable RTF, you’ll find that it is still a nightmare. Not only because Word generated horrible unoptimized RTFs and only used Unicode text if it couldn’t avoid it, but also exactly because it can represent everything that a Word document is, and that is an unfathomable amount of stuff to be able to represent, even for Word 97. (None of which the alleged RTF spec tells you how to render or lay out.) My personal answer to the question “why can’t one replace Word?”, or rather “why are all replacements for Word either failures or not particularly better?” is that Word can do (and thus supporting its format requires you to implement) so much that being compatible with Word is effectively equivalent to just being Word. To be fair, OpenOffice Writer is a pretty decent Word and I do use it when I need one, but it’s very uninteresting as a contribution to the field of handling formatted text on computers.
- thrower123 5y agoI used a portable version of Word 2003 for many many years. It would run off an old 128MB flash drive. The extra clicks every time you try to save anything in newer versions of Office before you can get to a file picker dialog is truly maddening.
- ropeladder 5y agoF12 is your friend here. (It brings up the old file save as menu in most office software, wish it was more standard, actually)
- makecheck 5y agoYeah, and I’m terrified by the “new” UI Outlook keeps prompting me to “try”, knowing that one day the old one will probably just go away. The new UI takes up way more space and completely messes up my preferred split-screen approach (e.g. instead of working in a 50/50 layout, the new UI basically forces the split to be more like 70/30 with less useful stuff on screen).
- chris_wot 5y agoI just can’t work out how to turn off “focused” inbox. I want me mail, and all of it!
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIt's there fortunately. I also turn off threaded and focused modes because they make it too likely I miss something.
- udev 5y agoI am a Windows user since 3.11 (so 25+ years). I am yet to see a single instance when a troubleshooting wizard was not a complete waste of time.
- silvershell 5y agoNo kidding... So true.
- baud147258 5y agoWhat I find the worst about Teams' search is how it can find individual messages, but not the context surrounding them! So you can find the question you asked 6 months ago, but not the answers! And no way to go back to a precise date in the past (or I haven't found it) and scrolling too quickly is buggy. Between my two work computers, I have different versions of outlook and between the two, Microsoft seriously screwed up the search. Though I don't have issues with the windows search, maybe because I don't search inside the files (I don't use windows search to do that)?
- bwat48 5y agoYeah the teams search drives me crazy, I can find the comment I'm looking for, but it's impossible to find the thread with all of the important context if it's too old reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ Only denvercoder9 is myself!
- fomine3 5y agoThis. I can't believe this garbage is considered to serious option.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThis... It is so annoying. Especially as we use teams for longer now and looking back manually is really unfeasible now.
- userbinator 5y agoand scrolling too quickly is buggy. Blame the "designers" who thought infinite scrolling was a good idea. Combine that with a disappearing scrollbar and it's a usability nightmare.
- abakker 5y agoI wish so bad I could just dump teams chats to a .txt file. I must have 100s of pages of chat with some people. And, the people I chat the most with are the chats I need to search the most, and it also the place where search works the worst!