5 ms·

Oh for the simplicity and consistency of Office 2000. I now live in the hell that is Office+SharePoint+Teams, where features churn at random intervals and nobo

by jl6 5y ago

Oh for the simplicity and consistency of Office 2000. I now live in the hell that is Office+SharePoint+Teams, where features churn at random intervals and nobody knows where anything is really stored. This is a real thing that happens to me regularly: Someone sends me an email with a spreadsheet attached. Except it’s not an attachment, even though it looks like one. Needless to say I can’t access it until I’m online. I get online and find that the attachment is actually some kind of link. I click it and it opens a web browser. Inside the browser is Teams. Then actual Teams opens, and inside Teams is a half-assed version of Excel. I can do some casual browsing around the spreadsheet, but I need real Excel to use it properly. There is a button to open the spreadsheet in Sharepoint, but I avoid that because I know it’s a trap (Sharepoint is where the three-quarter-assed version of Excel lives). The button I need is “Open in Desktop App”. And I finally get to use the spreadsheet. But apparently it is stored on Sharepoint? Or is it OneDrive? And Teams is actually Sharepoint behind the scenes anyway? Autosave will be turned either on or off, randomly, so maybe my edits are being auto-shared with other users? I guess I can get back to an old version because Sharepoint versioning is turned on. Or maybe it isn’t? I can share the spreadsheet with a colleague, but I can choose to make it read-only - so how does that work? Have I now got two copies of it, a read-only one and a writeable one? Is it really my file anyway, since I got the link to it from someone else originally? (I do actually know the answers to some of the above questions, but what an utter farce it has become).

okeuro49 5y ago
On the other hand, when Office 2000 was popular, the popular alternative was quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls
- zz865 5y ago
  until its amended then becomes new_quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Works for me.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yeah at least you could still find that back. And if you misplaced it, it was your own fault and not just lost in some dark corner of the cloud.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls People still do that even with Teams and SharePoint.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Everything I do is saved on sharepoint and onedrive. I don't know what the hell sharepoint is or how to access it or if it is even different than onedrive. but its happening at my institution so, hey. I always attach real docs to my emails though never the editable linky things, and I periodically rename my doc under different file names to preserve older versions, even though I've heard it keeps autosaved versions somewhere inside the document. I guess I just like the "physicality" of separate document files for security. All these things said, I actually like one-drive quite a bit. It allows me to easily switch between computers etc.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  OneDrive is pretty good but it's very picky about filenames. This is because of its SharePoint backend. I found a workaround though: using an encryption tool like Cryptomator the filenames are also encrypted and any funky characters end up in nice acceptable-everywhere base64. Additionally Microsoft doesn't get to look over my shoulder. Win-win (I'm on Mac tough otherwise it would be Win-win-win :-) )
jmnicolas 5y ago
You make me happy that my company is too skint to buy all those solutions: we're still sharing Office 2016 actual files by email (some poor souls are still on Office 2010). I uninstalled Teams from my PC (it was crashing) and only use it in Edge for the few confs I must participate in. Now if I could throw away my (yup still corded) phone and stop my colleagues from coming to my desk to interrupt me, I would be happy ;)
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  We got rid of our business desktop corded phone recently. Now we have a USB headset and voice calls over the IM software instead! But I have three completely separately networked environments with three machines on my desk. I may be working on one with the other two locked. If I am lucky enough to notice I am being called, I have to switch my headset over to that machine. This now means a phone call requires instant messaging first to make sure the hardware is in place. And don't even get started on the accessibility advocates take.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Well my desk phone is the old office thing I miss the least. And I was actually an accredited Avaya administrator. But I moved to mobile management as I saw the storm coming. I really don't see the need anymore for intra-office communication and the IM tool is way nicer than the Avaya softphones ever were. Funnily enough their first one was pretty lightweight and great and then they kept rebranding it and making it this bloaty, slow and ugly "One-X" thing. Also I LOVE the trend of people asking first if I'm available for a call. That's an amazing trend. I also work on multiple machines too but I'm always signed in on my phone too so if someone rings me on Teams I'll hear my mobile going off.
tiffanyh 5y ago
100%. I can confirm above is entirely real and extremely painful. I too experience this daily.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lostcolony 5y ago
At least you got emailed the file. I frequently had it start with someone telling me "that's in the (XYZ) doc". And now I don't even have a starting point (even XYZ is an organizational descriptor, and in no way part of the title or contents of the doc).
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> But apparently it is stored on Sharepoint? Or is it OneDrive? And Teams is actually Sharepoint behind the scenes anyway? Yep it is and in fact so is OneDrive itself. So in the end everything is stored in SharePoint. Somewhere. Somehow. SharePoint isn't exactly good at finding stuff however so it's all there somewhere but doubt you'll ever find it back in SharePoint proper. Totally agree with your post by the way. Office 2000 was also really fast (even on my Pentium 1 laptop!), offered all the features I need even today and didn't constantly update itself changing stuff around or breaking things. But selling one copy in 21 years is not a good business model and software as a service is what Bill was crazy about even then. So O365 was inevitable. I think SharePoint is by far the weakest part of the offering though. Even without it being used as a backend for the other services it inevitably ends up a trash bin of old stuff that nobody knows how to find or update. I've even seen the most rigidly managed projects fail miserably.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  Sharepoint is misery.
  - eitland 5y ago
    I've given up on reporting it so here you get another for free: if you use the information protection feature in SharePoint, be sure to test it extremely carefully. We evaluated it for a project two years ago and what we luckily realized before putting it into production was that there was a simple and straightforward way for an end user to download unencrypted versions of all the files they had access to, and no way to prevent it that we or the local Microsoft team could find. (This was before the pandemic and might have been fixed now but it was so bad I figured it is worth mentioning. It was trivially easy once you know about it, something about how you logged in, but there was nothing to warn admins about it.)
    - mcny 5y ago
      If I understand your scenario, it is pretty silly anyways and probably meant as a checkbox to tick for procurement to agree to purchase Office 365. It does not make sense to me to say I can view a document but not download it. If I can view a document, I can do screen capture. I think this used to be called the analog hole or something.
abakker 5y ago
this is only the tip of the iceberg of Teams hell. Another thing that really happens: 1. you share a $file with $person1 over chat. 2. you share that same $file with $person2 over chat. $person2 cannot read it. they do not have permission to access the file that is stored in the team with $person1. Over a certain file size, teams defaults to hosting _some_ files out of your one drive, but can't figure out the permissions. Or: 1. you start chatting in a meeting. The chat persists. The meeting is cancelled. Now the chat is called $meeting_name (cancelled). All the files and chat are attached to that. or: 1. you have a chat with $person1 and $person2 2. you are also on a team with $person1 and $person2 3. you are on a calendar invite with $person1 and $person2. ALL of those have their own file storage directories, chats, and PERSISTENCE. But, they are not linked, and everything in them is permanent, but cannot be searched (effectively) The fact that teams meetings have persistent file share and chat is actually mind bending. Because that feature is not just "meet with a team". final one: 1. you can be on team with 5 people. 2. you can create infinite channels in that team, not everyone in the team is necessarily on every channel. The file structure of the channel is _not_ hierarchical from the team. sorta. I honestly don't know what they are thinking. Instead of version control, save as, and renaming, we instead have an abysmal proliferation of shares which are at any given time being cleaned up, archived, or purged for non-use by an IT department who is doing their best. But, as users, I can spawn a new discrete file share environment for every single chat I have. Don't even contemplate what happens when you have 4 people in a chat, share a file and add a 5th person. all the possible inversions are terrible. Also: none of the stuff in the teams, files, folders, calendar chats, channels, or one-to-one chats end up in my Onedrive. None of this stuff can be turned off by group policy, either. If anyone at microsoft reads this: Please, allow group policy to disable file STORAGE in arbitrary chats. share is fine, but I don't want to send a file to someone and have that stored version become the authoritative version. I want to send them a file. If i wanted a cloud version, I could put it in a team or in one drive.
swiley 5y ago
Emacs is more user friendly than Office.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by jl6 5y ago

okeuro49 5y ago

On the other hand, when Office 2000 was popular, the popular alternative was quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls

zz865 5y ago
until its amended then becomes new_quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls
CamperBob2 5y ago
Works for me.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yeah at least you could still find that back. And if you misplaced it, it was your own fault and not just lost in some dark corner of the cloud.
mr_toad 5y ago
> quarterly_sales_figures_final_v2_2002_Q2_3_final_v3.xls People still do that even with Teams and SharePoint.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Everything I do is saved on sharepoint and onedrive. I don't know what the hell sharepoint is or how to access it or if it is even different than onedrive. but its happening at my institution so, hey. I always attach real docs to my emails though never the editable linky things, and I periodically rename my doc under different file names to preserve older versions, even though I've heard it keeps autosaved versions somewhere inside the document. I guess I just like the "physicality" of separate document files for security. All these things said, I actually like one-drive quite a bit. It allows me to easily switch between computers etc.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
OneDrive is pretty good but it's very picky about filenames. This is because of its SharePoint backend. I found a workaround though: using an encryption tool like Cryptomator the filenames are also encrypted and any funky characters end up in nice acceptable-everywhere base64. Additionally Microsoft doesn't get to look over my shoulder. Win-win (I'm on Mac tough otherwise it would be Win-win-win :-) )

jmnicolas 5y ago

You make me happy that my company is too skint to buy all those solutions: we're still sharing Office 2016 actual files by email (some poor souls are still on Office 2010). I uninstalled Teams from my PC (it was crashing) and only use it in Edge for the few confs I must participate in. Now if I could throw away my (yup still corded) phone and stop my colleagues from coming to my desk to interrupt me, I would be happy ;)

_carbyau_ 5y ago
We got rid of our business desktop corded phone recently. Now we have a USB headset and voice calls over the IM software instead! But I have three completely separately networked environments with three machines on my desk. I may be working on one with the other two locked. If I am lucky enough to notice I am being called, I have to switch my headset over to that machine. This now means a phone call requires instant messaging first to make sure the hardware is in place. And don't even get started on the accessibility advocates take.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Well my desk phone is the old office thing I miss the least. And I was actually an accredited Avaya administrator. But I moved to mobile management as I saw the storm coming. I really don't see the need anymore for intra-office communication and the IM tool is way nicer than the Avaya softphones ever were. Funnily enough their first one was pretty lightweight and great and then they kept rebranding it and making it this bloaty, slow and ugly "One-X" thing. Also I LOVE the trend of people asking first if I'm available for a call. That's an amazing trend. I also work on multiple machines too but I'm always signed in on my phone too so if someone rings me on Teams I'll hear my mobile going off.

tiffanyh 5y ago

100%. I can confirm above is entirely real and extremely painful. I too experience this daily.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lostcolony 5y ago

At least you got emailed the file. I frequently had it start with someone telling me "that's in the (XYZ) doc". And now I don't even have a starting point (even XYZ is an organizational descriptor, and in no way part of the title or contents of the doc).

GekkePrutser 5y ago

> But apparently it is stored on Sharepoint? Or is it OneDrive? And Teams is actually Sharepoint behind the scenes anyway? Yep it is and in fact so is OneDrive itself. So in the end everything is stored in SharePoint. Somewhere. Somehow. SharePoint isn't exactly good at finding stuff however so it's all there somewhere but doubt you'll ever find it back in SharePoint proper. Totally agree with your post by the way. Office 2000 was also really fast (even on my Pentium 1 laptop!), offered all the features I need even today and didn't constantly update itself changing stuff around or breaking things. But selling one copy in 21 years is not a good business model and software as a service is what Bill was crazy about even then. So O365 was inevitable. I think SharePoint is by far the weakest part of the offering though. Even without it being used as a backend for the other services it inevitably ends up a trash bin of old stuff that nobody knows how to find or update. I've even seen the most rigidly managed projects fail miserably.

johnebgd 5y ago
Sharepoint is misery.
- eitland 5y ago
  I've given up on reporting it so here you get another for free: if you use the information protection feature in SharePoint, be sure to test it extremely carefully. We evaluated it for a project two years ago and what we luckily realized before putting it into production was that there was a simple and straightforward way for an end user to download unencrypted versions of all the files they had access to, and no way to prevent it that we or the local Microsoft team could find. (This was before the pandemic and might have been fixed now but it was so bad I figured it is worth mentioning. It was trivially easy once you know about it, something about how you logged in, but there was nothing to warn admins about it.)
  - mcny 5y ago
    If I understand your scenario, it is pretty silly anyways and probably meant as a checkbox to tick for procurement to agree to purchase Office 365. It does not make sense to me to say I can view a document but not download it. If I can view a document, I can do screen capture. I think this used to be called the analog hole or something.

abakker 5y ago

this is only the tip of the iceberg of Teams hell. Another thing that really happens: 1. you share a $file with $person1 over chat. 2. you share that same $file with $person2 over chat. $person2 cannot read it. they do not have permission to access the file that is stored in the team with $person1. Over a certain file size, teams defaults to hosting _some_ files out of your one drive, but can't figure out the permissions. Or: 1. you start chatting in a meeting. The chat persists. The meeting is cancelled. Now the chat is called $meeting_name (cancelled). All the files and chat are attached to that. or: 1. you have a chat with $person1 and $person2 2. you are also on a team with $person1 and $person2 3. you are on a calendar invite with $person1 and $person2. ALL of those have their own file storage directories, chats, and PERSISTENCE. But, they are not linked, and everything in them is permanent, but cannot be searched (effectively) The fact that teams meetings have persistent file share and chat is actually mind bending. Because that feature is not just "meet with a team". final one: 1. you can be on team with 5 people. 2. you can create infinite channels in that team, not everyone in the team is necessarily on every channel. The file structure of the channel is _not_ hierarchical from the team. sorta. I honestly don't know what they are thinking. Instead of version control, save as, and renaming, we instead have an abysmal proliferation of shares which are at any given time being cleaned up, archived, or purged for non-use by an IT department who is doing their best. But, as users, I can spawn a new discrete file share environment for every single chat I have. Don't even contemplate what happens when you have 4 people in a chat, share a file and add a 5th person. all the possible inversions are terrible. Also: none of the stuff in the teams, files, folders, calendar chats, channels, or one-to-one chats end up in my Onedrive. None of this stuff can be turned off by group policy, either. If anyone at microsoft reads this: Please, allow group policy to disable file STORAGE in arbitrary chats. share is fine, but I don't want to send a file to someone and have that stored version become the authoritative version. I want to send them a file. If i wanted a cloud version, I could put it in a team or in one drive.

swiley 5y ago

Emacs is more user friendly than Office.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]