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I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrast
by vjk800 1y ago
I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stopping at any random time to load some bullshit becomes unbearable after some time. A bit like the chinese torture method where they would drop single drops of water on your head and over time it becomes painful.
- krembo 1y agoIt's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.
- jeroenhd 1y agoOffice is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.
- BarryMilo 1y agoIt's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers. > LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases. Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.
- ponector 1y agoWe are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did! On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.
- smallerize 1y agoOh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.
- strongpigeon 1y agoI used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.
- pete1302 1y agoI have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.
- hannob 1y agoI mean, it's not as if Libreoffice was created yesterday. Its predecessor OpenOffice is now 25 years old. Your question becomes: Why did you choose the expensive version where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place?
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoConcerning > Why did you choose the expensive version Big companies have (sometimes hard negotiated) volume contracts with Microsoft, which makes Excel much cheaper to them than to, say, small companies. Thus Excel is not really expensive for them. Concerning > where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop. In the past, Microsoft has been quite reliable in keeping backwards compatible, and continue selling office for decades. In my observation, the zigzag course that Microsoft starting doing with Windows (but is now also doing with office), and, relatedly, deviating from the course of being very insanely dependable in delivering the software that companies need from them, is what by now got big companies at least have a look at what possible alternatives to Microsoft products could be.
- freeAgent 1y agoYou are vastly underestimating the number of people who use pivot tables and even more “advanced” Excel functionality like Power Pivot/Query.
- jeroenhd 1y agoEntire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives. I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process oversaw transport for goods worth millions every day. I tried my very best not to reach for a Windows VM, but there was nothing that could work on these files. For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.
- skrebbel 1y ago> For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere. Wow that was a very Dutch comment! I wonder whether it resonates with the Americans here :D
- kermatt 1y ago> software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans This sums up my entire experience of "Enterprise applications".
- Maxion 1y agoFor any modern SaaS to be enterprise grade, it has to have an excel export feature.
- Qem 1y agoLibreOffice has dynamic tables, an equivalent to pivot tables, for many years already.
- Nemo_bis 1y agoThey're also just called "pivot tables" in some locales.
- TinkersW 1y agoI tried using LibreOffice on Windows, and it was super slow and kept crashing. It is also so ugly & annoying to use that it must be intentional. I really don't understand how this market is dominated by an abusive platform(MS Office) & a broken POS(LibreOffice).
- Maxion 1y agoThe only way for a competitor to have a chance at breaking in to the market, they need to be able to open any xls or xlsx file.
- __mharrison__ 1y agoExcel powers the world and is the most common programming environment. Programmers don't like to hear that truth.
- jodrellblank 1y ago> "because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something" It's crazy to me how often Open Source pushers have the vibe "I don't use computers, I don't know what anyone does with computers, but I'm still dismissive and superior". I almost made this comment earlier today in reply to [1] which was another "You have problems with Linux? I daily-drive Linux for years and I've never had any problems" comment and the issues were common/well-known things - fractional scaling in Gnome, HDMI, screen sharing in Slack, crashes in Google Meet, crashes in Chrome, KDE unstable, missing desktop software they use, audio too buggy, constant crashes in another program after days of work. Nothing anyone would be surprised at, except a Linux user who - apparently - never does anything with their computer and is baffled that other people do. I decided my comment was too trolling and didn't finish it, but here you are bringing that vibe again: you don't know what Excel does or why people use it, but you're confident that you know better; prompting me to actually call it out. The first thing I looked for when I installed LibreOffice most recently, I found a thread[2] asking: "In excel you can create a table simply by using insert->table. Is there a way to create tables in calc, as well?" and the first visible reply is them explaining that they don't want to create a table in Write, they want Excel's "insert table" feature in Calc. Why would they have to explain that again already, their question was two short lines. Presumably the people replying don't know that feature exists. There are some people being helpful and suggesting ways to get similar effects, but of course there's "Why do you want to insert a table into a Calc spreadsheet? It doesn’t seem like a feature that I’d use much" ("I don't know what the feature does but I know I don't want it"), a couple people commenting explanations of what Excel's tables are and why they are useful including a link to a video demonstration ... followed by someone saying "It already works, they are called database ranges" - no, that's different. Someone who doesn't know what they are, didn't read the explanations or watch the video and still thinks they know better. Crazy. One of the earlier repliers comes back with "LibreOffice has a database component which is by far more powerful than any fake tables on a calculator’s grid." doubling down on "I don't understand it, didn't read the explanations, don't respect you enough to consider that you know anything about what you want or do on a computer, I still know better" and with namecalling it 'fake'. Crazy. Note, to avoid the obvious tangent, that I'm not demanding people implement features for me in free software. As the thread ends by kerosene5 "Instead of spending so much time poo pooing the feature request, you could explore it. It really is a good feature. I just downloaded and opened my bank transactions and the very FIRST thing I did was look how to convert it to a table. . . . back to Excel." It's not "1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something" it was the very FIRST thing they wanted, and multiple people in that thread want, and the second thing I wanted. No this is not the only feature Excel has that LibreOffice hasn't; if you want to know why people aren't using Open Source software? Try actually looking and listening instead of whatever that is you are doing. [Edit: THIS IS YOU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855927 ! Of course it is. Of course it is]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43855663 [2] https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433 https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433
- Ygg2 1y agoI'm using OnlyOffice and it's pretty great. Definitely better than LibreOffice.
- kgeist 1y agoInteresting, our company migrated from Jira to Youtrack (by JetBrains) and never went back.
- msravi 1y agoApart from Excel, isn't google docs or libreoffice a viable alternative?
- alex989 1y agoDepends on what you do. You lose like 85% of the features but I bet most users never touch any on them.
- leshenka 1y agoLots of documents have to be styled in a very particular way. These rules aren’t laws of physics, they’re made by humans to make other people’s lives more miserable than it’s necessary Absolute most of the time what is offered by markdown is enough. When doing my thesis I was asking myself “is it really that important to use 16pt font or 14pt one or this is a made up rule because someone said so many years ago”
- steebo 1y agoThere are alternatives. Loads of them. But using them requires thinking about what office software you use, which is too much for the vast majority.
- freeAgent 1y agoThe alternatives are honestly not as good.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoLinear.app and it's not even close.
- freeAgent 1y agoIt’s not an Excel alternative?
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoNo it's a JIRA alternative.
- codr7 1y agoDefinitely has everything I need and then some, a breath of fresh air compared to Jira.
- jeltz 1y agoLibreoffice has vastly superior CSV support compared to Microsoft office. The alternatives often have different strengths and weaknesses.
- freeAgent 1y agoI’ve never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but I’ll take your word for it. For text operations, I frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.
- asdsadasdasd123 1y agoThere are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office
- gregmac 1y ago> It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware Bloatware is unwanted software, usually pre-installed or otherwise not installed by the user, that slows down your computer and takes up space. So if a user wants Office, it is, by definition, not bloatware. Even if we do consider it bloatware -- pre-installed, unwanted by the user, and using up system resources -- that isn't an explanation of why Office itself is slow.
- jajko 1y agoIf only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care. Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right. Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bare hostname, still 0 finds (when searching all mailboxes, including body). Maybe its some exchange settings, who knows, who cares. Pissed off fighting such basic tech instead of doing actual work.
- geekifier 1y agoI use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways. It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.
- brobdingnagians 1y agoI am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...
- pessimizer 1y agoI think search has been deprecated in general because it gives the user too much control over the output. Through search, people can quickly find what they are looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be. I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing this.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ii41 1y agoWait, I have the impression that water torturing is either US or Soviet invention?
- gilgoomesh 1y agoFrom Wikipedia on Chinese Water Torture: > Despite the name, it is not a Chinese invention and it is not traditional anywhere in Asia. Its earliest known version was first documented by Hippolytus de Marsiliis in Bologna (now in Italy) in the late 15th or early 16th century, and it was widely used in Western countries before being popularized by Harry Houdini in the early 20th century.
- bloak 1y agoIt turns out that there are lots of different water tortures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture) but the "Chinese" one was first documented in Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture However, I don't recommend reading those articles beyond the first paragraph and list of contents!
- earnestinger 1y agoAmericans go big. They use plenty more water during enhanced interrogation.
- brainzap 1y agoIts sad because using Excel for quick decision making can be a super power, these days I use apple numbers
- EFreethought 1y ago> "using Excel for quick decision making" Could you expand on that?
- max51 1y agonot op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel. Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes. Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.
- deburo 1y agoThey switched to hardware acceleration in the last few years and they removed the toggle to disable it. It still sucks (perf & rendering issues, eg. scrollbar not updating when scrolling) and there's no way to go back to the old rendering engine unless you disable hardware acceleration on Windows as a whole. Lmao.
- naikrovek 1y agowhat kills me about things like this is if you load a 1-2 decade old version of office on a computer today, things are fast. all they had to do was keep up with whatever features are different in excel between now and then and implement those. leaving the menus and UX mostly alone, only improving things as time went on. update the engine to do the new features, and update the UI only enough to expose the new features and make them accessible. but no... UX people don't have jobs if they can't redesign shit for no obvious reason. PMs don't have jobs if they can't force nonsense features no one ever asked for. Developers don't have jobs if they don't aggressively chase every new fad and tool and be in a constant state of learning (and thus unlearning). this whole world is stupid and was a mistake.
- bluedino 1y agoThe Mac version is even worse.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoFor Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while editing.
- superconduct123 1y agoIts because everyone is already locked in to use it
- godelski 1y agoPeople question why I use vim and live in the terminal. Well... because everything opens up instantly, and I can run email, spotify, my editor, debugger, pdf reader, file browser (with image previewing), and everything I need while using less than a gig of ram and barely any CPU usage. Not only that, but I get to make the things work in the way I want them to, not have to constantly hunt down random menus. If I'm ever confused I just press ? and 99% of the time find the answer faster than it takes to reach for the mouse. Even a shitty TUI usually is faster and easier to use than many GUIs. Yes, there are times GUIs are better. I don't want a TUI Gimp, but for a lot of stuff, I don't need the bloat. It's because I don't like the Chinese torture you're referring to. We're programmers, we don't have to live that way.
- tomrod 1y agoNeat. I'm interested in your TUI setup. What do you use?
- godelski 1y agoNothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these. Day to day I'm listening to music, reading emails, internet, and writing programs with vim (half my time I'm ssh'd into other machines anyways. I do ML research). So I got pretty much everything covered except Slack and Signal
- tomrod 1y agoThanks! Your use case sounds similar to mine (and some the same workload).
- DecentShoes 1y agoHow are you doing Spotify?