Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365 MS Office changed its name to Microsoft 365 years ago, but now appears to be doing a mastercleanse to fully scrub away the brand and embrace the entire suite as "productivity" rather than Office apps. Microsoft already renamed its Office 365 suite to Microsoft 365 in 2017, but now Office.com – the domain that hosts the web- …
And LibreOffice doesn't crawl its way into every nook and cranny of the registry.
The registry, by the way, which is one of the most collosal cock-ups of computing in modern times. An undocumented, fragile, non-normal-form, quadratic access database of items many of which can crash the OS if corrupted or left in the wrong state by a crappy uninstaller.
To be fair, having individual configuration files creates a lot of clutter and wasted disk space. Not sure what the "correct" solution would be... maybe replace the registry and individual config files with a SQL database... but there are good and bad points to everything. A bad init.d config file or systemd value could cause the exact same problems of an unbootable machine. We old timers can still remember the scourge of seeing "LI" on boot and then hearing a string of expletives.
Even Linux has gotten away from this of late. While macOS kind of does this, you are not so subtly guided towards having all apps "installed" in the /Applications directory.
I like the idea myself, and you can get portable versions of a lot of apps, but sometimes that means functionality is limited. It's not the 1980s anymore where every app was essentially an OS unto itself.
That was a while ago. I remember playing the original Doom in college where all the C: drive partitions were write protected, with a writable D: drive.
Doom had its save file location hardcoded as being on the C: drive. So you could play it, but you couldn't save.
Which meant you had to finish the whole thing in one sitting. Got pretty nerve-wracking towards the end.
In the early days of Windows 3.x, there were many Windows applications that were absolutely rock-solid and were $20 or less. Part of their robustness was they had all their configurations local to their own directory and didn't rely on the registry. The manufacturers had to make sure their software was solid to keep their prices low.
I dunno; having to do full uninstalls and reinstalls of 2003 to fix OLE errors instead of just doing a repair install was a time sink and highly aggravating for both the end user and the tech who got saddled with it.
while I hate the ribbon interface as much as everyone else, office 2010 was probably the most stable of the lot in my arrogant opinion.
(and don't get me started about the Charlie Foxtrot and five dimensional gymnastics that are required to install things like Office 365 when another 'office' program like Visio is present.)
I still use Office 2010, although I am resigned to someday having to move to the far inferior and quirky 365--if I live that long. When I hear my wife, an academic who shares an office with me, cursing and grumbling over some screw-up as she prepares her class notes and papers and slides, I know that 365 has struck again. Office 2010 under Win 10 just keeps on keeping on.
This is one of my soapbox arguments when people choose Microsoft rather than my recommendation.
IIRC this first manifested itself with Office 2000, where Microsoft not only removed all their Service Packs for the product, but it looks as if they coerced other sites to do likewise. This is almost spiteful, vindictive behaviour: but Microsoft, these are your loyal customers.
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I don't suppose you can reinstall Office 2010 every few weeks when the grace period expires? Or does it have a hidden registry key, which then means a full OS reinstall?
I find the performance LibreOffice to be atrocious.
Highlighting cells in calc doesn't update the count and selected column/row count in the status bar immediately.
Saving files in OpenDocument format in Calc causes them to take a very long time to load, the fix was to use Excel's format.
I don't understand, it was a fresh, clean install on a fresh install of Windows on a machine with a 5950X.
LibreOffice has a feeling of jank that surprises me.
I used to work in the printing industry and had to stand around endlessly while marketing "people" agonised about whether PMS 184 was the right colour for that bit of the new logo, or maybe PMS 185 was more in keeping with the zeitgeist of the streets (or whatever).
It's no wonder I drink.
I used to be locked into Office because I used a lot of Excel sheets with (VBA) macros. I never understood why nothing else (including MS Office for Mac) supported (Windows) Excel macros.
At work, I'm now forced to use GSuite and am actually quite happy with it except some places where they decided to keep Excel behavior (where it was particularly boneheaded like merged cells) rather than actually implementing it in a useful fashion.
The thing is, what functionality do the latest versions of Word and Excel really have over WordPerfect and 123?
I made a lot of money back in the day by being a Certified WordPerfect trainer. I also setup the corporate identity for some pretty meaty organisations. In those days you setup style sheets and everyone used those templates for all of their work. No fudging the margins or changing the font size to make it fit.
Telephone support was easy too, once the application has focus.
What is the difference between then and now? I would hazard a guess that it is something to do with proper training. Who goes on training courses these days to learn how to use Word? It's expected that you know how to use it, and this arguably starts at school. But the overviews at school presumably concentrate on the frilly things you can do with the program, rather than the disciplined approach that should be ingrained into the corporate psyche. Trouble is that these people move up the ranks, so ad hoc becomes the norm. Then you have the situation that there are an endless stream of new versions, which means it is not viable for companies to provide training for every new iteration that is issued.
I still have clients still using WordPerfect: a non-IT savvy actor/author - the books he has written are thick cross-referenced tomes where accuracy of indexing of the content is critical. He supplied the indexes to the publisher. His wife who has awards to her name for the work she has done for the BBC is also a user.
The first thing that logo reminded me of was the excellent (if you like prog) concept album Dimensionaut. It feature's Phil Collin's other son on drums, and was produced by one of Genesis's sound engineers.
Time to give that another listen, then maybe rewatch Red Dwarf Ouroboros for the complete Möbius experience.
I've said it before (re. DropBox and someone was kind enough to quote me later), but good Logos don't use colour gradients (color transitionations for the yanks) because they don't work in grey scale or black and white or with the colour blind. This new effort depends almost entirely on colours, as such, I don't expect to last long in the its current form.
For all that's not to like about it, Microsoft Office, was very good branding. When it was launched it defined a new category of which it was, obviously, primus. Microsoft 365 on the other hand sounds like little more than a subscription service. Okay, this is what it is, but it's not very aspirational, is it? What is it people can expect to get from their subscription?
Charlie Clark wrote:
Okay, this is what it is, but it's not very aspirational, is it? What is it people can expect to get from their subscription?
Let's see... automatic, forced updates with no control over when they are installed (it's decoupled from windows/Microsoft update); background usage of your internet connection to download said updates with no real control over bandwidth usage*; a STRONG attempt to push you to storing your documents in OneDrive (to the point where autosaves anywhere else are forbidden!), and the usual spate of showstopper bugs, security holes, and the usual drivel that Office has been famous for. And the occasional bought of it being unable to be used (web app mode) or to contact the license server to get it's "mother may I" pass when the servers fall over (locally installed mode).
I think that covered the bulk of it?
* It might use the OS settings for bandwidth throttling if it's running on windows 10; I wouldn't rightly know, I'm using it on an enterprise managed system...
If you're in a corporation and they flick the switch you're getting OneDrive.
I'd worked something was wrong when it made a new OneDrive directory in my home directory and was moving documents into it, then it choked on a bunch of source code trees. It even moved the Desktop and Documents folders into the OneDrive folder. I mean, WTF is that about, can't MS sync files any other way?
So that was a couple of hours wasted putting everything back and then uninstalling OneDrive, which will probably be impossible in Windows 11.
OK so it does look a bit arsey.
Still, it's a double-twisted Möbius tape so I had to (t's Friday after all) tear a strip off a piece of A4, fold it and staple it in the shape of the new MS365/goodle drive/arsehole logo and play with it.
Turns out if you tear the strip in half, you get... an intersecting triangle thing known as a Valknut, a Norse symbol co-opted by rightwing nutters as a symbol of white supremacy.
Plenty conspiracy theory material right there!
ACK on 1900 not a leap year. Occasionally I need to dredge up my old date to days algorithm and that one 'if' statement about leap years being divisible by 4 and either NOT divisible by 100 (1900), or divisible by 400 (2000), but that may not work with non-Gregorian calendars or the various times in which a calendar correction was made. Still ok for anything after the 18th century.
(last time I used it was re-writing some bloatware web page calendar javascript data entry thingy for picking a date, for which the old one was some canned BS-ware that used, of all things, JQUERY - when I got done with it, NATIVE JS ONLY - and the adaptation of 30 year old C code was pretty straightforward)
Not sure if they are aware of this, but it takes twice as long to navigate a Möbius strip as it does a normal strip.
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Rumours that this was inspired by a Microsoft exec putting the belt on his trousers the wrong way round one day are purely fake. Sadly the diet he was on at the time is not THAT effective.
I knew someone would point that out.
Microsoft don't currently use the reverse side of a ribbon though. Don't give them ideas!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVC7bU2bL2U
Of course, if the strip is cut length-ways it turns into a normal strip of double the length, albeit half the width. MS seem to have a preference for making these things wider though, so that the ribbon occupies the whole screen at the expense of being able to edit a document.
"Of course, if the strip is cut length-ways it turns into a normal strip of double the length, albeit half the width."
It's actually a little bit more subtle than that... Try it, then cut the resulting strip in half lengthwise again. The end is result is probably not what you would expect.
It looks more like a mangled and tortured piece of plastic.
Perhaps inspired by a vaguely remembered Escher drawing of an impossible object, badly executed in MS Paint, by the coloured pencil department HOD's nephew.
Unfortunately the resemblance to Escher is as close as Vogon poetry is to real poetry (pick your own poet).
(Or as closely as he resembles the sorely missed Paris icon) ------------------------------------------------->>
when they admit office 365 &3/4 is a huge pile of poo and the only reason it sells is because
1. nobody gets fired for buying it
2. everyone and their dog has files that only office can read (unless the file is over four years old , then you'll need libra office)
oh... and dont even get me started on the huge amount of e.waste coming when win 11 trashes 1/2 the world's PCs for next to no gain.
I actually got scolded and even ridiculed once back in 1997 when I was doing remote work and I was e-mailed a document "in the new format". I asked very nicely if I could get documents in RTF format, got the scolding and ridicule, and ended up paying $$$ for the NEWER Office 97, which had CLIPPY in it. WORST. PURCHASE. EVAR!
Amen. I just noticed this morning that MS has re-designed the GUI for editing mail flow rules, because "better"...
And really, what in Hell's name was wrong with the previous (classic) Exchange Admin panel? Oh, right, it had all the Exchange-related settings available from a single screen instead of strewn across 3 or 4 different admin areas. Yeah, we can't have efficiencies like that, gotta make the admins work for their money.
So many stupid ideas in the past 5 years. O365/M365 could be a somewhat decent product if MS would stop fucking with it constantly.
If you go through the effort of following the edge that disappears underneath, it seems to get lost. If it’s supposed to be a Möbius, it is badly done. It’s more like a poorly implemented illusion.
Pretty well summarises my experiences with Microsoft Office. +1 for LibreOffice.
The only bit of real actual advice that I can remember from a Government business start-up course in the 1990's, was make sure you don't use paper clips in any office, as they get into printers and jam them, and today, it's almost come full circle, Microsoft's 'virtual paper-clips', aka. Windows Update, and the endless crappy non-functioning updates, that are preventing printing.
The new logo looks like dirty water heading down the plug hole, and precious files on iffy OneDrive are the baby.
On a device smaller than 10.1'' (so no need for subscription YET, though adding 365 is a giveaway) I have to now log in using a Microsoft account, when all I want to do is save the file locally to my device, offline. I don't always have a mobile signal.
An Office feature that I expected to remain, because it came on software installed at the time of purchase, not something I've added, but with updates, Microsoft have added more and more restrictions on use, to the point of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It now no longer provides its core function any more.
More BS from Microsoft, telling us what we can and cannot do, while slurping our data.
Where's the UK's CMA competition watchdog on this? Fcuking nowhere, that's where.
It's not just frippery either - it's a significant frustration in working with MS products. searching for information is really difficult when products are being renamed all the time, especially when multiple unrelated products moved under the same brand e.g. skype (business vs home), PowerApps (canvas vs model-driven)
The worst currently is 'Teams' which refers to the business program which most of us have to use (and its cloudy back-end), and also to the consumer chat thing in W11 which pins itself to the taskbar but which nobody actually uses.
I watched some of that Ignite thing. It was painful - loads of airy rhetoric from people who were Soooo Exciddeddd about everything but very little of any substance. Changing logos was about the level of it!
And Outlook which is both a mail client and a consumer email service.
Why are all icons blue? Everywhere you see, is this hideous blue / purple conmbination.
For someone colorblind, like myself, telling apart the icons for Onenote, Outlook, Teams, Word or Visio at a glance is impossible.
I'm sure there is some w*nker artistic explanation why not to use a more extended color palette, but not sure if I want to hear it.
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