4 ms·
What modern MS Office features are missing from '97 but still useful? I'm thinking you won't be able to write formulas using Latex. There's also a 32-bit limit
by ogogmad 5y ago
What modern MS Office features are missing from '97 but still useful?
I'm thinking you won't be able to write formulas using Latex. There's also a 32-bit limit for the amount of memory a program can use.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoI think the worst would be .doc extensions instead of .docx Other than that, give me WP5.1 baby
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoIMO, .doc might be the second worst format ever invented (second to PDF). It is a proprietary, binary only format for storing text documents. Who thought that was a good idea?
- idiot900 5y agoIt's an artifact of a time when RAM was extremely expensive and CPUs were slow. Dumping the in-memory binary representation to a disk was apparently the logical choice at the time.
- Taywee 5y agoToo bad SQLite didn't exist at the time. It would be a pretty good candidate for something like that without eating bogs of memory for large documents. To be fair to the Office team of the day, when your company also develops the compiler and can guarantee the safety of writing and loading raw structures under specific constraints (even in ways that violate programming language standards), it's not too bad of an idea. Not that it's the greatest, as even then there were certainly better ways of doing it, but the landscape of serialization wasn't as nice as it is now.
- p_l 5y agoSQLite would not be a good choice. DOC file format, combined with OLE containers, was designed at least partly to deal with common practice of keeping documents on floppies, and to make saving documents as speedy as possible. This meant a combination of pseudo filesystem (OLE containers can be summarised as a variation of FAT filesystem) and blittable data structures. This way when you saved an updated version of the document, Word would only extend the file with new changes, minimizing amount of I/O necessary. Another aspect to this was that DOC was not supposed to be interchange file format - that's a role that was supposed to belong to RTF. Which was much easier to parse and had formal, published specification instead of memory dumps of internal data structures. However it took a more resources to update such file, so RTF and DOC were kept in sync when it came to capabilities all the way to Office 2003 - everything you could do in DOC, you could do in RTF, and vice-versa. Of course, practice quickly went in different direction and most people only think of RTF as the simpler sibling of DOC, because WordPad on Windows used it.
- im3w1l 5y agoQuick and easy for the devs too I bet.
- p_l 5y agoNot quick nor easy at all - it was an optimization for end users.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoI cant judge .doc on its technical merits, but its closed nature is really something. Rumor is that, in the end, even MS didn’t understand the format?
- ghostly_s 5y agoPDF is possibly the most successful technology in computing history.
- bitwize 5y ago
- Lammy 5y agohttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- agumonkey 5y agoPhotoshop is said to be on par. Similar reasons behind the 'format' .. or dump.
- kaba0 5y agoWhy is pdf bad in your opinion?
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoIt's a 2000 page spec that links to other specs (eg JPEG, PNG). It is a turing complete document format that can run arbitrary code without a sandbox. It is a mix of a binary and text format (some opcodes are in binary, some in text which just why?). All in all, it is a format designed to be incredibly hard to implement so people just give up and pay adobe.
- kaba0 5y agoOther than some stupid feature of it (like some of the ones you mentioned, maybe also forms), I really don’t think it is too hard to implement - there are plenty of open-source pdf reader libraries.
- leni536 5y agoPlenty as in poppler, mupdf and pdfium? Are there others?
- kaba0 5y agoThere are open-source libraries as well for e.g. Java, C# and I guess a bunch of other languages.
- aembleton 5y ago20 years ago, fresh out of uni, my first job was working on some delphi that modified pdfs. With no libraries! That was painful.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoFrom what I've seen, most of the libraries out there are some mix of incomplete and slow. From my testing (from a few years ago), most of them supported about 80% of the documents you would see in the wild. Good support for FDF (form fillable PDF) was really bad pretty much across the board.
- Yaa101 5y agoPDF is not for making documents with, it's for making bundled printouts that almost universally are printed right on most printers.
- selectodude 5y agoI'm not sure if it's considered a feature, but high DPI support in text editors/viewers is such a game changer for me that I can never go back.
- loosescrews 5y agoCrash recovery OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice always used to do this much better than Microsoft, but my understanding is that Microsoft has made more of an effort more recently. It is also useful if the program gets unexpectedly closed (for example by a reboot).
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoI’m not so sure. I lost a day of school work in November because Word crashed and I wasn’t syncing the file to the cloud. It seems you need to use the cloud service for decent crash recovery.
- ghostly_s 5y agoMy experience is that every Enterprise IT department deploys their Office installs / workstations in such a way as to render Office's crash recovery useless.
- jamesy0ung 5y agoI usually save every time I make a major change (around an hour)
- folmar 5y agoOffice 97 has autosave, which works quite nice, I'd say better than current Office but worse then Open/LibreOffice.
- hulitu 5y agoWorks quiet nice until it crashes and corrupts both the autosave file and your working document. First thing i do after i install office is disable autosave. Got bitten badly.
- jhpaul 5y agoIt looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?
- hulitu 5y agoI know you are being serious but the joke was: "It looks like you're writing a suicide letter. Would you like help?"
- pcwalton 5y agoOffice 97 is probably missing support for modern Unicode (i.e. astral planes). Apparently Office 97 was the first version to support Unicode at all, but I bet it's BMP only. I also highly suspect Office 97 has no support for modern OpenType features, so your text may look worse, depending on the font.
- ziotom78 5y agoApart from what others have already written, there is little support for multimedia formats. So, if you want to embed some videos in a Powerpoint presentation, expect troubles…