It is so weird, I remember Office 97 loading very fast on Intel Pentium 3. Now suddenly it needs preloading on startup with 4-6 core PCs…
It would be awesome if we could map the increase in hardware demands on popular software by each new feature, design changes, and other minor changes added over time.
Don’t use Windows? Use Linux instead.
Just a thought.
Remember the other day when Microsoft boasted that 40% of their code is written by AI?
I switched to LibreOffice more than a decade ago and I never missed Microsoft Office 🤷♀️
Another libreoffice user here. Published a couple of academic works edited entirely on it, and no one complained about formatting errors. Things have improved a lot in the last years. We also have onlyoffice as another great alternative
+1 I used LibreOffice all through university, wrote dozens of papers, did class presentations, résumés, etc. Never had a problem. I use it at work too and collaborate with O365 users often.
Such an awesome piece of software. I used OnlyOffice as well, really nice if you don’t need the fancier features that LibreOffice has.
Wait isn’t OnlyOffice more feature wise closer to MS office, and with a more similar layout? Used it shortly but realized I like the “older” non ribbon UI of LO, but I’m still relearning the old office layout.
It’s designed to be more compatible with MS’ .docx formats, less weird formatting issues when converting between them. But the actual features it has is less than LibreOffice.
Two different focuses, LibreOffice is designed with more powerful features and uses the .odf file format by default.
OnlyOffice is lighter weight and designed with MS Office compatibility first and foremost, although both suites support both file formats and in my experience, both work great with either file types and for basic users, have all the features you would need.
Obligatory
Coming soon to your neck of the woods… Copilot OS! Now with no Windows, only Copilot and a shitty embedded MS Edge. Everything you know as Windows is hidden behind an enforced Microsoft account which you cannot bypass or opt-out! Oh—and don’t forget—you now need a PC with 64GB DDR6789 RAM, RBG+ chipset with tiny peener cache, 2 BRAIN TRACING GPUs, SUPER SECURE BOOT, TrustClock, Lie Detector, Bio-metric reader created by NSA, and their secret time bomb tracker that will secretly ghost all your data at a moments notice and require you to purchase the subscription to ALL STAR MEGA SUPER SONIC ULTRA CLOUD DATA WAREHOUSE. Oh, but hey, at least it’s software upgradable…
Windows is actually streamed from the MS Cloud™. Only Copilot and the Word loader run locally.
What? You live in a lower income country and doesn’t have a reliable internet connection and a high spec machine? Our board of directors have a personal message for you:
spoiler
“Fuck you!”
Libre does this as well.
Libre gives you an option to do this, or not, at the time of installation.
Correct, but the default for many years was to just do it.
I have been using LO since many years and don’t have any recollection of not being asked at the installation.
Care to share some details of your experience/knowledge in the matter?
It’s a checkbox in the installer, easy to miss. Has defaulted to off for a very long time now, basically ever since SSDs have been commonplace.
Of course it’s slow, it’s full of telemetry, spyware and built-in AI junk, it couldn’t be any different
But now windows takes longer to boot and is too slow because ms office is always running in the background. +1 for reasons to use linux.
I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.
My current company uses brand new $1,500 HP enterprise grade laptops and they frequently freeze up, stutter, and get really hot from basic office work.
My old Debian servers I used to have there were running butter smooth with KDE Plasma on 12 year old hardware.
All those screenshots don’t get processed for free.
OfficeClickToRun.exeis years and years old. This isn’t a new thing at all.that’s the c2r maintenance process. main job is to set up and update the local files for office.
It’s a maintenance process which preloads essential office files into memory for usage when you launch the different Microsoft applications so their startup time is reduced as well.
Windows already takes far to long to load. I turn on my Linux PC and by time I stand up to get a coffee it’s ready to go, then I remember it’s Saturday and I won’t be using Windows 11 all blessed day!
And this is how adding code to Word 97 for 28 years without refactoring works.
Interestingly they did the same with Word 97: loaded Office at startup so it would seem to launch faster.
Microsoft shouldn’t have killed Wordpad. Imagine if they updated it instead with docx compatibility.
See people wouldn’t need to install Word if the builtin wordpad opened Word documents. They can upsell it to you and use your data
Use Emacs. It’s much better then MS Office, and it has Emacs server.
What do you use for spreadsheets on Emacs? At least org-modes tables are but quite it…
But will it fuck up my formatting when I add an image?
But will it fuck up my formatting when I add an image?
Ctrl+Shift+F+U+FC-x M-c f i
Emacs is a text editor that can also do other things. It’s an alternative to something like VScode or notepad++, not an office suite. It’s super archaic too, so it will always have a niche crowd.
I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.
Yeah I remember something similar, office quickstart I vaguely remember it being called
