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.
People 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.
I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P
Emacs probably enables more functionality than vscode or any other tool. You can literally browse the web or send emails from emacs - I’m not saying you should, but the potential for performing tasks are infinite.
Vim has by far the better default user interface, though.
Nothing 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
I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library
Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work
side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.
not 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.
If 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.
I 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.
I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!
Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.
I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.
I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!
I 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...
I 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.
> 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
Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.
I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.
Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.
As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.
Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.
…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.
We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?
There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.
I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender, whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.
Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't have a working search.
With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.
Haha, I love your reply because it brings up auth. You can't do the slightest search or action without first pinging a web server with an auth token. Yet another source of wasting milliseconds.
Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.
On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.
Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.
Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.
As an update, I found that some of my issues were due to some bug in FileVault. My Spotlight would seemingly stop working altogether. The only solution was to toggle FileVault off/on.
I am using my mac with an LDAP (AD) user account, so I am possibly in the minority of people here.
I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring
It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up.
Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007.
Same with OneNote by the way and the web version can't even search in whole notebooks, just single folders.
We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.
SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).
I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?
Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails.
This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X
The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore at work lately.
It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email client.
PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit and miss.
For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly what I'm looking for.
There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by company or other details if I remember those things but sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's easily verifiable.
It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.
Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.
How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get local search right, global search is going to suck too.
Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.
But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.
It'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.
> 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.
We 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.
I 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.
Oh 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.
I 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.
Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance, often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization application. It's used as a database and application engine.
This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and safe.
Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should be switched out to a proper application with a proper database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries could do that. They better figure it out. Because these existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.
I 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?
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.
> For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
You know what's really interesting to me about this argument point?
It is actually the proprietary solution that is at risk of this, and we feel it daily. The next version of Microsofts own flagship product (Windows) is nearly universally denigrated, but people are forced to upgrade.
With FOSS, there's significantly less risk, if the product changes direction you and your other company friends can just use old versions or in the worst case.. fork it.
Entire 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.
> "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.
My god the amount of projection in your comment. It seems you've mistaken me for everyone who ever commented in favor of migrating off of Excel.
I"m aware that there are things I'm unaware of. Perhaps I don't know how to use Excel, I'm "no true Excel user" if you will, and therefore my opinion is invalid. Like you I'm baffled not by the technical side of things but by our reaction to it. People say "it powers 10% of the world's economy" but not "and it's a problem".
It's a problem. My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work. Governments should be doing that. But no, let's just say "the other one sucks" and continue to act like depending on a single for-profit company for all our economies is a good thing.
Not sure how my other comment relates to this. Is it arrogant to have preferences?
Lots 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”
There 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
I’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.
> 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.
They 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.
what 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).
> 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.
