5 ms·

Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for featur

Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.

binarymax 10mo ago
The only main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  Lambdas, PowerQuery and Python support on Excel aren't in Excel 98.
cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this. Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
- charlieyu1 10mo ago
  I don't know, I have been forced to update many times just to use Word. Win7/Word 2003 was working fine for me as a math editor. Somehow everyone changes to .docx, Equation Editor 3.0 was replaced, then one of my major client only accept Word 2019 files for consistency so I was forced to update to Windows 10 just to use that. And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
- dabockster 10mo ago
  Office 2000/XP with the XML based file formats would be perfect.
  - machomaster 10mo ago
    And this is exactly why I use Libreoffice.
  - philo23 10mo ago
    It's not exactly the same, but I definitely remember Microsoft releasing some kind of conversion tool around the start of Office 2007's life that could convert the newer XML based files into the older '03 compatible files. Or maybe it was the other way around... No idea if that tools still kicking around somewhere.
quantumwannabe 10mo ago
They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year. Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
- dabockster 10mo ago
  > the last pre-subscription version Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/cfq7ttc0pqvj https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-business-2024/cfq7ttc0pbm7 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
  - tombert 10mo ago
    They're routinely cheap on Groupon as well, often under $30.https://www.groupon.com/deals/world-office-standard-2024 https://www.groupon.com/deals/world-office-standard-2024 Not that I want to encourage people to keep using Microsoft products.
    - dabockster 10mo ago
      I want viable alternatives too. But Microsoft's stuff accounts for a million+ edge cases that you don't really encounter until you're neck deep into whatever you're working on. For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office: https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough. > LibreOffice No.
- tombert 10mo ago
  About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again. I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription". I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
wvenable 10mo ago
Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.
wilsonnb3 10mo ago
Track changes and collaborative editing are both pretty important features IMO
bsder 10mo ago
O365 lock-in is all about Outlook. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.
- trollbridge 10mo ago
  Is there really any moat around Outlook, though? This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
ezconnect 10mo ago
The only feature they added is you can't open other Word files so you need a new version.
danpalmer 10mo ago
> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more. There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it. And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc. None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
- diegolas 10mo ago
  op looked at their way of using the tool and assumed everyone else used it the same limited way
pjmlp 10mo ago
SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.
everdrive 10mo ago
People no longer really look at a product and ask if it does what they need, they just compare it to the previous product and ask if the newer product has 'more.' More is ALWAYS better, and there's no reason to think past this stage. In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete. Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.

binarymax 10mo ago

The only main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.

pjmlp 10mo ago
Lambdas, PowerQuery and Python support on Excel aren't in Excel 98.

cosmic_cheese 10mo ago

I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this. Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.

charlieyu1 10mo ago
I don't know, I have been forced to update many times just to use Word. Win7/Word 2003 was working fine for me as a math editor. Somehow everyone changes to .docx, Equation Editor 3.0 was replaced, then one of my major client only accept Word 2019 files for consistency so I was forced to update to Windows 10 just to use that. And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
dabockster 10mo ago
Office 2000/XP with the XML based file formats would be perfect.
- machomaster 10mo ago
  And this is exactly why I use Libreoffice.
- philo23 10mo ago
  It's not exactly the same, but I definitely remember Microsoft releasing some kind of conversion tool around the start of Office 2007's life that could convert the newer XML based files into the older '03 compatible files. Or maybe it was the other way around... No idea if that tools still kicking around somewhere.

quantumwannabe 10mo ago

They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year. Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.

dabockster 10mo ago
> the last pre-subscription version Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/cfq7ttc0pqvj https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-business-2024/cfq7ttc0pbm7 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- tombert 10mo ago
  They're routinely cheap on Groupon as well, often under $30.https://www.groupon.com/deals/world-office-standard-2024 https://www.groupon.com/deals/world-office-standard-2024 Not that I want to encourage people to keep using Microsoft products.
  - dabockster 10mo ago
    I want viable alternatives too. But Microsoft's stuff accounts for a million+ edge cases that you don't really encounter until you're neck deep into whatever you're working on. For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office: https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough. > LibreOffice No.
tombert 10mo ago
About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again. I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription". I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).

wvenable 10mo ago

Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.

wilsonnb3 10mo ago

Track changes and collaborative editing are both pretty important features IMO

bsder 10mo ago

O365 lock-in is all about Outlook. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.

trollbridge 10mo ago
Is there really any moat around Outlook, though? This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.

ezconnect 10mo ago

The only feature they added is you can't open other Word files so you need a new version.

danpalmer 10mo ago

> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more. There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it. And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc. None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.

diegolas 10mo ago
op looked at their way of using the tool and assumed everyone else used it the same limited way

pjmlp 10mo ago

SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.

everdrive 10mo ago

People no longer really look at a product and ask if it does what they need, they just compare it to the previous product and ask if the newer product has 'more.' More is ALWAYS better, and there's no reason to think past this stage. In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete. Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.