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Anyone else miss Office 97? You just installed it locally off a disc and it just worked when you needed it. You didn’t even need internet.
by mrfusion 4y ago
Anyone else miss Office 97?
You just installed it locally off a disc and it just worked when you needed it. You didn’t even need internet.
- Arrath 4y agoI'll happily use an old Office, just please splice in the "What do you want to do?" search bar so I don't have to hunt through nested menus/ribbons for some obscure formatting option I use once every 6 months.
- elromulous 4y agoOlder office didn't have the god awful ribbon.
- copperx 4y agoIn my view, the ribbon was an incredible UX innovation; I just resent Microsoft for patenting it. A ribbon could improve so much software. Don't forget that cascading menus are an antipattern. What's not to like? Common functions are one click away, and others are two clicks away. Are you saying lengthy drop-down menus were better? I don't see how.
- fartcannon 4y agoWell I used to read a list of options horizontally, then click one and read a list of options vertically. Now, with the ribbon, I must observe a grid of different sized and shaped objects. That's harder to parse, in my opinion.
- elromulous 4y agoI haven't used office in a while, but I remember that once a function wasn't in the "home" ribbon, finding it required searching through the other sections. And the division of those sections was super counterintuitive for me. Whereas I could usually hazard a pretty good guess where something would be in the drop-downs.
- paulmd 4y agoLibreOffice is actually pretty great, it's not "run on a Pentium 100 MHz" fast but it's stable and works well for basic office spreadsheet/word processing/powerpoint tasks.
- the_snooze 4y agoIt works well until you need to send and receive documents from MS Office organizations. LibreOffice mangles layouts and formatting in DOCX and PPTX files.
- anthk 4y agoGet metric compatible fonts.
- tomrod 4y agoThe UX is mighty rough. Last I worked heavily on Calc it wasn't terribly compatible with other spreadsheet software like gnumeric, though perhaps that has changed.
- progman32 4y ago2 years ago I decided to fire up my Pentium#100 and write a technical plan on it using Office 2000, for my real life corporate job. It worked magnificently, no fuss, plan presentation went fine. Faster on a 100mhz machine with 16MB ram than whatever monstrosity underlies O365 and Google Docs.
- bee_rider 4y agoNot really. Office suites were a mistake. Return to text editor.
- tpmx 4y agoImagine a world with something markdown-like instead of Word...
- bitwize 4y agoExcept for one: Ashton-Tate Framework. "Emacs for business" gets you within a stone's throw of how flexible and powerful Framework was back in the day. Of course its UI wouldn't fly in today's world, but back then (early 80s) it was a revelation.
- javajosh 4y agoOffice 97 and Windows XP was something of a high point in personal computing. The internet has enabled entirely new product categories, but it has also badly eroded old ones with the solvent of MRR greed. Merely selling a thing just ain't good enough, especially if it's software. Even offline applications are SaaS, now, where the "service" are frequent updates that leave you at the perennial mercy of every company from which you purchase software (and every company with which they do business, recursively). I'm normally pretty sanguine about business models, but when I lay it out like this, I find it quite disturbing. So I won't think about it.
- CPLX 4y agoI just want a simple version of MS Access in the cloud.
- gopher_space 4y agoAirtable?
- userbinator 4y agoOffice 2003 was probably the peak, and then it started going downhill with 2007.
- Markoff 4y agoyou can still ban internet access in firewall and activate it locally, I'm using last offline installable Office 2019, 365 can't touch my computer