Again: switch to Linux already, use Libre Office or if you have to, google docs. Heck, install onlyoffice if you want it self hosted online, anything but Microsoft
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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We have 64 bit multi-core CPUs unconstrained by clock speeds, RAM, bus bottlenecks, instructions sets, addressing modes, registers, or storage speeds. Monitors are beyond visual resolution, graphics are pumped out at a rate of zillions and gazillions of 32 bit pixels per second. How can any software be anything less than instantaneous these days? How can this modern bloated AI-dreamt high-level sludge code be as slow as my Commodore 64 booting GEOS from a 5.25" floppy?
The mouse button shouldn't even have time to bounce up from my finger releasing it and the screen should already be loaded.
Companies running 10-20 year old hardware and the amount of spyware that exists nowadays gets in the way
Tons of legacy code that has to run at startup.
And better hardware means there is no longer a requirement to optimise.
What was "if we don't make this code more efficient, it won't run on modern computers", turned into "we don't need to make this code efficient because modern computers will be able to run it"
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So what does this version of office actually do that my ancient copy of office 2003 doesn't, besides bog things down?
So their AI can't fix this issue?
Needs more vibe.
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 🤷♀️
(EDIT: I don't mean this dogmatically, there are plenty of times I have had to compromise and go back to proprietary software, but LibreOffice really has successfully replaced Microsoft Office for me - it's just as feature-rich and reliable with a similar UI. Google Sheets has a few features that I like and which aren't in LibreOffice or MS Office, but I only use that for work when I need a collaborative sheet.)
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.
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.
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.
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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 the individual Office applications would seem to launch faster.
Its horrendous, my work windows laptop the amount of crap just loading at startup is getting stupid.
Most of my coworkers never turn their machine off, but I appreciate windows taking it's time. Warming up the work laptop in the morning is like a ceremony at this point. Solid 10-15 minutes to grab coffee, have a chat, check the feeds... Lol I wonder how much time/productivity is collectively wasted across the country from this crap.
Every time you want a break just relax and if the boss shows up just restart your computer. Tell them you're waiting for the system to boot after it froze or installed an update.
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"Nah man you just need a little more AI bullshit crammed into all your apps." -Microsoft, probably
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I’m having flashbacks to Word 6 for Mac, when everyone downgraded back to Word 5.1.
I'm forced to use Windows due to work and damn is it slow. File explorer feels so sluggish compared to Dolphin
Deleting files and folders in Windows is the one that gets me. It's so incredibly slow, and if you try to cancel it manages to take even longer "Cancelling...".
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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
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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.
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Don't use Windows? Use Linux instead.
Just a thought.
Looks like you got unsaved changes....
Save as...Untitled.docx.....Very Complex Naming Convention that my company came up with.docx save!
OK what's the name of the file? Here's a random location could you rename the file once more and tell us where to save it in one drive?
Of course it's slow, it's full of telemetry, spyware and built-in AI junk, it couldn't be any different
Install Linux. Use OpenOffice. Problem solved.
Don't use OpenOffice, it's nearly unmaintained, use LibreOffice
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Obligatory
I remember when I was tasked with fixing up a personal/work PC of my colleague who was our lead artist. I was a bit shocked to see WinXP there, when win10 was already the norm, and with quite a bunch of severely outdated software on it. At the time, I thought "well, at least it does the job well enough for him to be still employed". Now I understand that he was probably onto something...
i'm just surprised HOW they are able to make text editor apps so heavy and slow. seriously, HOW??
There used to be a bug in ms word (idk if it's still there, it's been years since I last used any ms office app) where, if you had a separate printing server connected to a printer, and the printer was off but the server was online, it would try to fetch printer features, resulting in an unanswered request that would end up timing out. For some reason, word would completely freeze until the request timed out at 30s. No input worked, screen didn't refresh, window controls didn't work either. Completely frozen. And the worst part was that word would try to fetch printer features every time you clicked completely unrelated buttons. Want to export to PDF? Frozen for 30s. Want to save your document with a different name? First wait for 30s. Oh, you want to change the page size? You guessed it, 30s frozen.
Libre does this as well.
Libre gives you an option to do this, or not, at the time of installation.
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They shouldn't have made it so bloated then. The 2003 version opened fairly quickly, even on a late 90's computer.
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