4 ms·

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new f

by bambax 1y ago

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

tomatocracy 1y ago
Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).
- bambax 1y ago
  Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif. XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match). Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
  - tomatocracy 1y ago
    The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining. And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
threatripper 1y ago
How can it be free if you need to buy a license?
- reddalo 1y ago
  I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.
  - bambax 1y ago
    Yes.
- subscribed 1y ago
  No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the licence, unliie the current crop.
jasode 1y ago
>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols. I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened. I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.
- bambax 1y ago
  You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.
  - jasode 1y ago
    >; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension) A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638 It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel. The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.
reddalo 1y ago
I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.
spapas82 1y ago
Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment. The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again. I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.
- bambax 1y ago
  Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.
  - taneq 1y ago
    “View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.
    - pessimizer 1y ago
      It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.
      - jasode 1y ago
        > I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files. Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.
Tempest1981 1y ago
I seem to recall some layout issues running on a 4k display, or with scaling set to 150% or higher. I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

by bambax 1y ago

tomatocracy 1y ago

Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).

bambax 1y ago
Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif. XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match). Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
- tomatocracy 1y ago
  The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining. And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.

threatripper 1y ago

How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

reddalo 1y ago
I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.
- bambax 1y ago
  Yes.
subscribed 1y ago
No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the licence, unliie the current crop.

jasode 1y ago

>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols. I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened. I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.

bambax 1y ago
You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.
- jasode 1y ago
  >; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension) A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638 It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel. The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.

reddalo 1y ago

I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.

spapas82 1y ago

Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment. The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again. I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.

bambax 1y ago
Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.
- taneq 1y ago
  “View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.
    - jasode 1y ago
      > I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files. Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.

Tempest1981 1y ago

I seem to recall some layout issues running on a 4k display, or with scaling set to 150% or higher. I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]