Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

What&#x27;s old is new again.<p>Microsoft introduced the &quot;Office Startup Assistant&quot; or &quot;Office Startup Application&quot; (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20041214010329&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.microsoft.com:80&#x2F;kb&#x2F;165071" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20041214010329&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mi...</a><p>OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called &quot;QuickStarter&quot;, I don&#x27;t know exactly when, but no later than 2003: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openoffice.org&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;setup_guide2&#x2F;1.1.x&#x2F;en&#x2F;SETUP_GUIDE.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openoffice.org&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;setup_guide2&#x2F;1.1.x&#x2F;...</a><p>Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_ it from Office 2010: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;previous-versions&#x2F;office&#x2F;office-2010&#x2F;cc178954(v=office.14)#office-startup-assistant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;previous-versions&#x2F;office&#x2F;o...</a><p>Are they now bringing it back?

Between Office&#x27;s increasingly bloated size, slow booting and <i>super</i> annoying CoPilot icon right where I&#x27;m working (which <i>still</i> can&#x27;t be turned off in OneNote) - I&#x27;m on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined.<p>Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it&#x27;s gone beyond &quot;Rude&quot;, is now passing &quot;Annoying&quot; and accelerating toward &quot;Yeah, I can&#x27;t do this.&quot; I just want to ask Satya &quot;How much <i>more</i> do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don&#x27;t need?&quot;<p>I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn&#x27;t get better, I&#x27;ll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I&#x27;ll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I&#x27;d be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.

I use Office software at work daily and I don&#x27;t understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It&#x27;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.

Wow, this takes me back.<p>I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster.<p>That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was &quot;make Office not get slower&quot;. It&#x27;s very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstraction or graphics object is actually the reason everything is worse, and it&#x27;s even more challenging when there&#x27;s no direct impact- just a broad increase in system memory pressure.<p>Typically, perf isn&#x27;t a few bad decisions. It&#x27;s a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it&#x27;s very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they&#x27;ve all been reassigned elsewhere.

I recently discovered that Apple has something called &quot;Pages&quot; and &quot;Numbers&quot; - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They&#x27;re so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.<p>It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual).<p>I&#x27;ve been working within the Microsoft tech stack for around 25 years now (mostly SQL Server). I used to be a huge fan of their products because they were one of the best companies when it came to developer experience (developers! developers!). Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Things are very different now. Of all the things I once liked, only SQL Server really remains (ironically, it&#x27;s a technology they acquired - it used to be Sybase). I still think C#, F#, and PowerShell are great, but I actively discourage people from using most of their so-called &quot;products&quot; because the quality is just appallingly low.<p>Even something like Visual Studio is better replaced with Rider + LINQPad. Their GitHub repositories are full of open issues that have been dragging on for years. There&#x27;s virtually nothing left of the old Microsoft that I still respect or admire.<p>That said, I have to admit that most other corporations aren&#x27;t any better - there&#x27;s a general trend of maximizing profit while offering the lowest quality that customers are still willing to tolerate. If I were starting IT studies today, I would go 100% down the open-source path.

Windows is bafflingly bad. It&#x27;s gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it&#x27;s always been bad. I&#x27;ve never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads during gameplay... I mean the list goes on.<p>I&#x27;m done with it. I&#x27;ve switched to Ubuntu and I haven&#x27;t looked back. I only boot up my Windows installation when I need to do game development on Unreal or use an incompatible program. But for now, MacOS and Linux are covering everything.<p>I used to be a big gamer but I&#x27;ve basically given up on playing games that don&#x27;t work on Linux. The selection of games is steadily growing and some games work at launch (like Oblivion Remastered).<p>I know there&#x27;s a lot of animosity for GNOME, but it&#x27;s the best Linux desktop in my opinion. In terms of polish it&#x27;s definitely the closest to MacOS.<p>Application installs are still an absolute pain, but it&#x27;s gotten better. At the very least I can now go through the Ubuntu App Center to get the most common apps. There&#x27;s the occassional app that doesn&#x27;t work (like VLC) and then I&#x27;ll have to look into Snap or Flatpak or whatever other variation of app packaging Linux devs decide to unleash on the masses... but then it works and I don&#x27;t think about it again.<p>One last gripe for me is the lack of HDR support in Ubuntu. I can&#x27;t use my LG C2 with it. But I&#x27;ve switched to using two Dell monitors with DisplayPort and now it doesn&#x27;t matter... and I use the LG C2 with something else.<p>For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I&#x27;m okay putting up with this pain if it means never using Windows again.

Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus.<p>Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others.<p>One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

At this point I view Windows as a legacy&#x2F;compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone.<p>And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bundled with the OS I paid for.<p>Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn&#x27;t daily drive it, so MacOS it is until Linux desktop gets to a more reliable state. I wouldn&#x27;t be shocked it gets there - I believe Valve made relatively low investments and got a lot out of it, GPU vendors have an incentive to support it - for compute workloads and the gaming on Linux is becoming a thing. Also for office stuff the EU-US hostility could force EU to look for alternative software providers and move away from Microsoft.<p>Actually thinking about this just made me donate some $ to Gnome project.

This is the kind of genius move you get when all your devs play leetcode all day and then have leetcode battles as an interview service.<p>Hundreds of millions of hours spent microfussing over leetcode and gatekeeping work because your solution isn’t copied from the top 5 solutions character for character. Only for the same devs to just abandon all optimization in the real job where it actually matters and implement an o(n^2) fraudulent time metric bypass.

Surprised there’s no mention of Google Workspace here. I’ve been using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It’s obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and simple, and they’ve steadily closed the feature gap with Word, Excel and PPT.<p>The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and <i>plotting</i>. If Google would take that product a little more seriously (rather than trying to turn it into a Notion databases clone), they could become a real alternative.

I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the worst contender.<p>Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn&#x27;t help the situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my computer. But if I boot up a Microsoft Office product I have a 33% chance that it crashes.<p>How can I build an AI model with no issue, find and replace instantly in an IDE for a projects that is tens of gigabytes and thousands of files with no issue. But I want to write a sentance onto a blank page in Microsoft Word, or Reply &quot;thanks&quot; to an email in Microsoft Outlook and the application crashes or takes 3 minutes to load?<p>I truly do not understand how Microsoft Office is still the dominant enterprise platform. These applications have horrible UIs, they are bloated, slow, and expensive. Yet every IT department foams at the mouth and gets a hard-on to sign their Microsoft 365 contract for $200 per user.

Quite a few years ago I read on Reddit a post made allegedly by a Microsoft programmer, who was telling that the young generation of programmers do not want to maintain the old optimized code (he was saying specifically about pipes in windows) and want to reimplement all fro scratch. In this example (pipes) they wrote a new pipe mechanism which then was lacking that ACL et. al. authorisation features and they had to hide it from normal programmers (made it somehow internal to system)<p>What it would mean (if we can believe this) is that Windows becomes a legacy burden and without proper management and knowledge will become a big ball of mud (if it&#x27;s not yet like this) unbearable and unmabagable.<p>Right now I can access at least five styles of UI, from different epochs, each one is doing something important in the system, BC one cannot rewrite everything to the new style without enormous funds

Microsoft have even managed to make Windows Explorer (a lot) worse in Windows 11. Auto-complete in the address bar completely unresponsive. Taking ten seconds to show the contents of a local folder. Interacting with network shares a complete usability mess. Looks a bit nicer though, and there&#x27;s tabs. Goodness knows who they&#x27;ve got maintaining Windows.

That&#x27;s is not a new idea. I think Office 97 had an accelerated startup that made windows take a little longer the boot but faster the start office.

My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me.<p>I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won&#x27;t be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I&#x27;ll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux.<p>I believe my Windows days are over as of, say, October 14 this year.

As a lay person, apps like Office feel like they stay the same between updates and somehow manage to get fatter and slower.<p>(I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ve got some new improvements tucked away but I don&#x27;t notice them.)<p>Or every time I update my OS it&#x27;s like a 10GB download. What did I just get for that 10GB? I honestly can&#x27;t tell.<p>Even my smartphone. Seem often where I&#x27;m asked to install a 2GB update aaand it&#x27;s same as before but slower?<p>Anyone else have this sentiment?

Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.

This from the team that brought a tool to recover files corrupted by Office, rather than fix the causes of file corruption. Then it becomes a &quot;feature&quot; you can trumpet, rather than a bug you squashed.

Ah, the oldest trick in the book. Luckily, I&#x27;m sure that no on else will think to try this trick, and Windows will continue to load quickly.

All I&#x27;m hearing is prefetch was put into new packaging and MS is calling it a new feature.<p>Management: Tweak prefetch and call it a new feature.<p>Dev1: Superfetch!<p>Dev2: We already did that.<p>Dev1: Superfetch for Office!<p>Management: Yes.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;all-right-gentlemen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;all-right-gentlemen</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;windowsground.com&#x2F;what-is-superfetch-windows-10-should-i-disable-it&#x2F;#what_does_superfetch_do_in_windows_10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;windowsground.com&#x2F;what-is-superfetch-windows-10-shou...</a>

If you have an old machine laying around, I highly recommend setting it up with Windows XP and Office XP. It&#x27;s a breath of fresh air if you have to use Office a lot. Also an agonizing reminder of how far Microsoft has strayed from the light. Office software was a solved problem, and somehow it isn&#x27;t anymore.

It feels like different teams at Microsoft don&#x27;t work with each other; they work against each other. I&#x27;ve noticed that too with Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short term metrics (shopping and &quot;creator following&quot; vs privacy, shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a coherent product.<p>Maybe stack ranking does create terrible culture.

I think Microsoft may doing that with Microsoft Edge as well. My Windows 11 Registry has an HKCU key called MicrosoftEdgeAutoLaunch_[...]<p>&quot;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe&quot; --no-startup-window --win-session-start

Office in general is becoming annoying. Like their attempts to force users to use onedrive and sharepoint by hiding existing features and changing the UI around it regularly to maximise confusion. It’s the same chaos as their control panel. And the constant attempt to ram bing down your throat.<p>Switched my desktop to Linux last month cause I’m just fed up with Microsoft’s user hostile bullshit<p>Alas at work I can’t do that

Outlook is so bad at email<p>Just utterly basic fundamental stuff that was working forever in other clients, like quoting replied text<p>Everyone at work has to resort to farcical formatting tricks, the email chain ends up a series of people saying like &quot;I added my comments in green bold below&quot;, &quot;my comments in blue italic&quot; like it&#x27;s a Word document instead of a message thread

I genuinely don&#x27;t know if it was a bug or intentional behavior like TFA, but on the last win10 machine I used Edge would leave several of its background browser engine processes running indefinitely after the application was closed. Seems like they&#x27;re just happy to let their users make unwitting sacrifices for their convenience of their devs.

For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you’d think they’d be concerned about the climate impact of this and why their applications are so inefficient.

Microsoft does not put it&#x27;s good programmers on its consumer-grade products, because Microsoft does not respect it&#x27;s consumers.<p>Microsoft puts its real talent on its customer-grade products, like Azure and SaaS. That&#x27;s where they make real money, so that&#x27;s where they send real talent. The only exception right now might be copilot, which will never make money... But they say that&#x27;s where they&#x27;re putting their best and brightest. Then again, they&#x27;re probably spending billions of CPU hours to generate millions of unique disclaimers and pleasantries - when they could instead use a simple look up table to efficiently weed-out the most common&#x2F;worthless prompts. That isn&#x27;t the big-brain design innovation that you&#x27;d normally expect from top talent. It&#x27;s not even baseline acceptable from anybody who actually knows the first thing about how computers work, really. They would rather spend 10 billion dollars on a single computer than to prioritize optimization. Its weird.<p>But do you want an electronics engineer who understands &quot;instructions&quot;, &quot;addresses&quot;, &quot;registers&quot;, &quot;clocks&quot; and even knows why a pointer works? Or do you want a modern CS major who can use a template to quickly crank out non-scalable apps in a software factory? These skills are mutually exclusive.

Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today&#x27;s software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software?<p>I would happily pay for software that<p><pre><code> was high-quality was fast was privacy preserving had sane defaults had&#x2F;provided reasonable support&#x2F;insight (forum and developer blog) had a fair pricing models (non-subscription, x-years of updates etc) </code></pre> as in<p><pre><code> an e-mail client an office suite a scheduler (scheduling learning, tasks, various deadlines, calendar, ...) photo&#x2F;video editor (wouldn&#x27;t need to be of the scope of a professional suite) a browser (earnestly, one that wasn&#x27;t a mere chrome re-skin, wasn&#x27;t run by a bloated paid by Google organization like Mozilla, and would take fingerprinting prevention and privacy seriously) ... </code></pre> or am I underestimating the problem? How many full-time developers working how many hours, building on open-source software where sensible (as in you wouldn&#x27;t hand-roll your own cryptography, networking protocol implementations, GUI libraries) would it take, for e.g. a good cross-compatible Desktop E-Mail Client? (there&#x27;s little in terms of software that I hate more than Outlook)<p>And given competitive non-US, maybe even non EU-wages for such developers, how many &#x27;customers&#x27; with fair pricing would such a company&#x2F;startup need?<p>You could open-source part of your stack (as in singular libraries) for exposure and good will, could maybe offer free-tiered versions, potential fair pricing models could be similar to Sublime&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sublimehq.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sublimehq.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;text</a> you could build upon technologies people are exited about and willing to take pay cuts for if that&#x27;s what they could work in (Odin, Zig, Rust, ...) etc...<p>Even considering vendor lock in, market dominance of existing solutions, the dominance of smartphones over desktops, isn&#x27;t there still a viable market? Maybe what&#x27;s left is even more so, given Desktop use seems (besides gamers) consist (to a significant extent) of power users, semi-professionals&#x2F;professionals &amp; businesses?<p>And, even though this place here is of course a highly niche bubble, the plights of modern&#x27;s software lack of quality are real and I&#x27;m sure felt beyond us.

I use LibreOffice for my personal needs, which is spreadsheets (I also donate to Document Foundation to support it). Sadly, even LibreOffice has suffered from being slow to start up, is bloated and sluggish (on Windows and macOS; I have tried it on Linux for a very long time).<p>It seems like all Office-like apps are cursed to be slow and bloated. It also seems like 32GB should be the bare minimum amount of RAM for a Windows machine today (even the “new Teams” app is sluggish nowadays and takes up quite a bit of memory or crashes often).

To me the craziest thing about this is that often times web apps with the same functionality feel leagues faster to load, with nearly equivalent functionality.<p>Google docs&#x2F;google sheets&#x2F;notion&#x2F;coda all load faster than the native MS Word &#x2F; Excel.<p>Photopea is another example - it clones out the main user paths of Photoshop and loads in a 1&#x2F;10th of the time.<p>I really don&#x27;t understand it.

Abandoning Windows after 25 years for Fedora gets validated with every &quot;Windows Innovation&quot;

Imagine explaining this to someome in 1995:<p>&quot;In thirty years our computers will have sixteen threads of execution at 4.5 GHz each, with 4 IPC or better, along with 16 gigabytes of memory that can move data at 50 gigabytes a second. Practically everyone will have solid state storage that loads and saves at more than a gigabyte per second. Many computers will have GPUs capable of beating the fastest supercomputers in the 1995 world, and most of that capacity will be used for little more than just pushing pixels to a monitor.&quot;<p>&quot;Wow! I bet Microsoft Word will load instantly!&quot;<p>&quot;No. It&#x27;ll take longer to load than Word 5.1 takes to load on an Amiga with an &#x27;060 accelerator running ShapeShifter. It&#x27;ll be so slow that Microsoft decides to load key parts of Office when the system boots, but only if you have more RAM than can be directly accessed by a 32 bit processor.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s something you&#x27;d expect from a snarky article from The Register or from me, if you know me, but I think both El Reg and I wouldn&#x27;t&#x27;ve quite gotten the full extent of it.

I still can&#x27;t believe how slow MS Word is to load a .docx document of about 150 pages of text, you can watch the page count in the status bar grow over a period of 10 seconds or more as it loads&#x2F;paginates it.<p>On the plus side, it&#x27;s nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that&#x27;s nice.l

I don&#x27;t know what is going on at Microsoft but words can&#x27;t express how fast their ecosystem has been going down the gutter. At this point, I do not recommend Microsoft&#x27;s products if a good enough alternative exists (many times it does).

The Cat in the Hat Comes Back engineering.<p>Can&#x27;t fix problems in a project? Increase the scope to make more problems elsewhere. Soon tentacles emerge, everything has problems, and your project doesn&#x27;t look as relatively bad.

Well, Libre&#x2F;OpenOffice does the same, but lets not get that in the way of a good Microsoft bashing round.

Headlines like this make me glad that org-mode has almost completely replaced Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for me (not to mention calendar notifications and Python notebooks). The only exception is spreadsheets with charts, which still require LibreOffice.<p>Granted, I don’t work in a corporate environment, so I’m free to choose my own tools. Living in Emacs is a blessing in today’s world of bloat, lack of control, short-lived cycles, and SaaS everything.

Seems at this point any low level code they concern them with is security because it can have legal consequences, or porting to new CPU versions, archs as it can have financial consequences. So C++ is slow? very well write some Typescript&#x2F;ReactJS frontend. It is slower? No worries, now you can run that in cloud. Anything else is to be taken care AI and crap. Problem solved.

Once in a while I’m happily reminded that I haven’t had to worry about this circus any more since I switched to Linux some 5 years ago.

They might as well load the rest of Windows at startup if that is the magic bullet of how many performance issues their OS and software has. It still shocks me that my cheap 8-year old laptop with Fedora on it feels all around snappier and a relief to work with than the computer handed to me at work. That computer would fly with a decent operating system.

The solution could be to rewrite some parts in Electron, Node and&#x2F;or other JavaScript-based junk, with millions of files and dirs in node_modules. That would surely improve performance. Electron developers still cannot use ZIP&#x2F;7z for storing their crap to save space and make loading faster. They invented their own ASAR which they also don&#x27;t use. The amount of node_modules crap only increases what is in line with ever-increasing entropy.

I don&#x27;t like a lot of things about Apple, but one thing I&#x27;m sure is I&#x27;m never going back to Windows

Fucken genius.<p>Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We’ll move the problem somewhere else.<p>I would like to know how we got to a place where any application taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in <i>any way</i>.<p>I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen?<p>All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important.<p>“CPU is cheap” — fuck you it is. If your application takes more than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around that thing <i>even if it is dotnet.</i><p>Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance and customer productivity (think of these as “minimizing the amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer”) are paramount. <i>PARAMOUNT!</i> — that means they’re one of the, if not the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions.<p>This world is going to shit so fecking fast

MSO defaults to &quot;load at startup&quot;. LibreOffice will if you let it (there is a small difference in propriety here).<p>The worst offender by far is Outlook (which isn&#x27;t really MSO but looks like it is, or is it?)<p>Against an on prem Exchange, I get way better performance from Evolution (Linux) than Outlook (Windows).

Surprising to see after their talk about recent improvement due to rust rewrites of some components..

LibreOffice has been doing this for ages, at least on Windows. It works well. And, to be honest, if you&#x27;re going to be using Office anyway, you may as well speed up launching it.<p>I&#x27;m surprised they don&#x27;t use the existing Windows Prefetching system for this, though.

Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a while. We were working on a job-seeker &#x2F; employer match-making application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints.<p>The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a &quot;fun fact&quot; loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we <i>slow down</i> the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.<p>We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this

Microsoft is too slow full stop.<p>When will there be a viable alternative that runs industry standard software?

I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.

I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS (Windows 11)<p>Both opened fully in a second. So just how much faster should these apps actually open?<p>I suspect this is aimed at Enterprise installations where the machines are gunked up with corporate spyware.

This is a fascinating contrast to Raymond Chen&#x27;s recent blog post about adding seconds to the taskbar clock[0]. Apparently there is some energy efficiency team at Microsoft which in some cases is so strict it blocked this feature for decades. But at the same time... things like this are allowed to happen. Something about Conway&#x27;s law perhaps?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devblogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20250421-00&#x2F;?p=111095" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devblogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20250421-00&#x2F;?p=11...</a>

As someone who programs embedded systems the bloat people have grown to accept in the userspace is utterly mindbogling to me.<p>Sure it is a challenge to write performant code, I know that as well as any other embedded programmer, but my feeling is that in userspace or web programming most people have stopped even trying to be performant.<p>They will give you paginated content with 10 items per page, items whose data makes up less than 1% of the javascript they are loading. Meanwhile you could literally give people <i>all</i> items with no javascript and be faster (if you have the luxury of knowing the number of items).

I&#x27;ve not had the greatest relationship with Apple software lately, however seeing every &quot;great idea&quot; that comes out of the Microsoft development team is quite possibly the only marketing Apple needs going forward.

I&#x27;m more surprised that this is news than anything else.<p>If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it&#x27;s already a well known fact that they do this. They&#x27;ve been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.

It goes really fast if you turn off the connected experiences like linked in, the AI crap, the splash screen, all the cloud shit and crack it with massgrave.<p>Like office 97 speed.<p>There&#x27;s your problem.

Over the next 6 months I need to decide on the platform we roll out for our small startup.<p>Windows is categorically left out.<p>Funnily, it is probably going to be Valve that will be the death of Windows.<p>All my Steam games runs better on Bazzite &#x2F; Steam OS without any Windows interruption. At some point, this will spread like a wild fire in the gamin community - teaching people about alternatives to Windows.<p>The next generation will not be bothered with Windows.

That is just the kind of duct tape, that they would come up with, instead of fixing the underlying issues. To be fair, probably by now the Office mess is unfixable in any sensible time frame, without a massive effort. And since offline&#x2F;local Office is not a priority for MS at all, they are probably not willing to invest the resources, and continue to sell shitty software.

Here&#x27;s a crazy idea: Make software that isn&#x27;t bloated with features that 90% of customers don&#x27;t actually use.

Anyone else still using Office 2007? 2010 is ok too but I hate the ribbon. One of our clients still uses it though.

I have an old copy of office 2003 I still use, it&#x27;s lightning quick on even ten year old hardware. It literally starts in under 1 second.<p>It needs a plugin to open and save docx but it works well.<p>I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s some fantastic functionality I&#x27;m missing out on but it works fine for me.

I made the observation back in the 90&#x27;s that Word will always take several seconds to load. Any longer and it becomes too painful, so Microsoft will figure out a way to fix it. Any shorter and it just means that there are more bloated features that Microsoft can stuff into it.

What Linux gui was it where you’d be in the desktop, but it was blocked by a modal until all components and startups were done loading? I always preferred that over a slow desktop environment struggling for resources while components were still starting.

They did this with IE back in the day right? Not because it was particularly slow, but because the it gave them an advantage over competitors like FF which couldn&#x27;t use preloaded windows libraries to load as quickly?<p>I might be wrong. I was a kid when I read about this.

Edge also does this, as in not just web rendering for those parts of Windows using WebView2, but Edge itself. You can supposedly disable it in Edge -&gt; Settings -&gt; System and Performance -&gt; Disable Quick Start

Windows 10LTSC gets updates till 2030 something.<p>Office 2016 is the last year before it went OneDrive and will still autosave documents locally.<p>Apparently there are activation scripts that can help you if you’ve lost your license information for these older products…

Personally i&#x27;d prefer just a &quot;lite&quot; version of the main apps, excel, word, powerpoint...<p>i dont need the other programs and ALL of them contain a TON of features i&#x27;ll never ever use (as a private person, not company of course)

Unfortunately,RAM is cheap, but even more unfortunate is that all these lingering processes tend to take some CPU, threads, IO, and even GPU time (dropbox for example. Why the hell do you need GPU acceleration????)

I have a habit of uninstalling any programs that take it upon themselves to start up on boot without me specifically requesting it. Any company with that little respect for the user isn’t one I want to be involved with.

Java distros once came with a thing that exercised Java once a minute or so to keep it in memory.<p>I found this running on a milling machine&#x27;s control PC, and I was seriously annoyed.

Fine with me. If 100% of my RAM isn&#x27;t in use at all times for low priority speculative cache, then it&#x27;s not doing what I want. So long as it frees up the RAM instantly the moment anything actually requests it.

I had a professor who worked for Microsoft with something related to coding some parts of driver installation or similar thing.<p>He literally has Vietnam flashbacks if working at Microsoft comes out as a topic when talking

Every program tries to run on windows startup and people wonder why their computer gets slower over time.<p>Download microsoft autoruns from their site to turn off everything that runs when windows start to do away with all the crap.

Libreoffice&#x2F;Openoffice have been doing this since quite early on (reason is that the ancestor StarOffice was designed as monolith, always loading the full suite of programs, and splitting it is probably very hard), so it seems to be an unofficial standard.<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s disappointing, since I remember early M$ Office version being blazing fast (but again, I suspect that there was some preloading going on).

That&#x27;s it, I&#x27;m switching to linux for real this time

Doesn&#x27;t Windows already precache frequently started binaries (and I presume the data that binary loads at startup)? Or was that a different operating system?

They should increase the speed of Excel on Mac. Not sure why its always so slow when entering data, etc…<p>There is a noticeable lag when you enter something in a cell and then hit enter.

Electron?<p>Isn&#x27;t Microsoft migrating all of their Office apps over to WebView2 (their version of Electron).<p>If so, I wonder how much of this is related to that than anything else?

It&#x27;s time for some severance at the office

That&#x27;s funny. My Emacs config does the opposite. It defers loading stuff until you need it to speed up initially load time.

Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I preload Emacs and Firefox.<p>Of course if you do <i>not</i> use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.<p>(And, frankly, if you don&#x27;t use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don&#x27;t run on a Steamdeck?)

The harm that Microsoft and Office has done to global productivity over the last decades is unquantifiable at this point.

Office is a horrible product. Our company left office a few years ago and it turned out to be a huge productivity boost.

I don&#x27;t see an issue with this, provided that this is disabled on home PCs by default.<p>For work devices for office work you want this.

Nothing new and closing Office applications don’t necessarily terminate some of the Office processes - notoriously Outlook.

Can anyone with inside information explain why these apps are slow? Why can they not just make startup faster?

Ehm this is nothing new. They did that decades ago.<p>Edit: Should have known I wouldn&#x27;t be the first to remember :)

I think the old Office 97 Shortcut Bar preloaded some Office dlls too, maybe not all of them.

Edge has been doing this for a very long time, since well-before Windows 11 existed.

I think someone said the definition of legacy code is code that makes lots of money.

It is a wrong thing to do ... soon .. no one would want to use Windows ....

Windows is too slow at startup, so microsoft boots it up before you buy it.

So instead of rounds of optimizations, it bogs down everything else..

I’m confused. Doesn’t office 365 online make this completely unnecessary?

Pages, Keynote, Numbers on Mac load in seconds. Thanks I’m good.

I just wish they didn’t shove onedrive down your throat.

This is one of the things that made people hate Vista. By default it was set to preload things into RAM in the background, gobbling up memory and potentially slowing the system down, both during the preload procedure and if you happened to want to run a program that the preload procedure didn&#x27;t account for.<p>Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.

I don&#x27;t want it to load at startup.

To be fair to Microsoft, Excel crashes far less frequently than it did 10 years ago so that is something I guess. I would put the &quot;productivity gains&quot; from that alone at +40%.

Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.

Dude, the only thing keeping me on Windows is Ableton. Can one of you super hackers go get a job there and port Ableton to Linux, plase? (it&#x27;s not great through Wine) I&#x27;d go with bitwig but I have a push device and it&#x27;s super cool. Tauntingly, Push runs a Linux Ableton variant in standalone mode, I&#x27;ve read. They&#x27;re mocking me.<p>I&#x27;m so sick of Windows.When Elon took over twitter and you stopped being able to say anything, I was banned because I told Microsoft I hate them and I hope they burn - I&#x27;d just received an update that forced some bullshit on me and it inconvenienced my personal and work life, I felt they needed told they suck.<p>I don&#x27;t miss twitter at all, I still hope Microsoft burns.

LibreOffice is still fast to start

ok but can they just optimize that to the ground or they just get fcked with backward compability and tech debt????

30% of code is written by AI!<p>The biggest problem is sharepoint. You save your files &quot;somewhere&quot; and links between them barely work

This is what Linux is for :))

Can they do this for vscode?

Maybe I&#x27;m an out-of-touch nerd who needs to touch grass, but I would love to see a world where Markdown has supplanted this glorified suite of XML editors.<p>Markdown has docs, slides, tables, diagrams (via Mermaid), and can be read on any system that has a text editor. It&#x27;s simple, non-proprietary, and future proof.<p>This repo says it all: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;markitdown">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;markitdown</a>

I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9 years now.<p>It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the smart&#x2F;cached shutdown thing they&#x27;re doing (I forgot the official name for it). I&#x27;m glad to see even some (un)official confirmation from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty much best practice in Windows land.<p>In Linux land today, FF and Chrome (but Chrome especially) take ages to start-up at first but system boot is as smooth as can be expected.<p>I thought I&#x27;ve made myself immune to UI bloat because, like all true programmers, I do everything on the terminal (short of browsing the web, like TRUE programmers). Until I noticed that whenever I invoke my terminal, it takes <i>ages</i> for the prompt to even appear, not to mention accept keyboard input.<p>After much frustration, I figured out that the culprit is---drumroll---NodeJS. Don&#x27;t quote me on this but I think Node brought Windows best practices into the Linux terminal.<p>Fortunately, Linux being Linux, I managed to patch my system such that Node doesn&#x27;t actually do anything unless I invoke it myself. The downside is that I have an odd script every now and then that relies on Node and these scripts would fail if I run them without having ran `node` beforehand.

What useful major features had Office even gained since 97?

What a mess..

What the hell Bruv........

and you got no say in it. this is why u need an option like gnu&#x2F;linux.

one day we&#x27;ll be able to estimate the underdevelopment and waste of energy caused from such a bad software, good for me I learned very early to stay far from the whole microshit world: never had any doubt.<p>...and his head is till pontificating on how the world should run...

I have been enjoying the comments on this one. :-)<p>There are sooo many things to unpack in the world of Windows. We could talk about Windows 11. We can talk about bloated software like Office or Visual Studio. We could even compare the performance difference between old version from the 90s to what people use today.<p>On one end.. I get it. Microsoft are throwing so much &quot;features&quot; at you, whether part of the OS or particular software like Office. If they dont their competitors will.<p>Microsoft &quot;Office&quot; use to be a Desktop Publishing suite which included the likes of Excel, Word, Access, etc. Now, Office is just a category of hundreds of applications accessed via the cloud. To think, whether on Windows bootup, or launching an modern application involves many API calls to something, somewhere in the world. No wonder applications like MS Teams takes 8-20 seconds to load (and that is sometimes being nice!)<p>Considering the specs of my PC.. it should load incredibly fast. Yet, for some reason, I could run something like Visual Studio 6.0 from the late 90s and will load INSTANTLY on a modern machine -- and it will be single threaded! Some may be thinking &quot;but modern Visual Studio has these features I cannot live without!&quot; -- are these excuses why it take so long to LOAD?<p>The problem we have is.. to some degree.. you have a development team who do not care about performance or memory. On the other end, you have a development team that are frustrated because it is outside their control what is considered IMPORTANT. If they speak up it might cost them their job.<p>I will always remember during my College days I had a project which was about doing 3D animations. We had to do a Presentation on our work at the end of the assignment. I think most people spend 50% of their project time on Microsoft Powerpoint. For its day, on the hardware available.. even that was bloat! They were fiddling with their text and images on screen. I was sooo fed up with it I decided to amend my program so it could be used as a presentation slideshow as well. Once added, all I had to do was use a text editor, writing scheme-like code to a file, covering how build each slide and animations. It was running smooth and fast and everyone was asking &quot;how did you get it to look so good&quot; thinking I am doing some cool trick in MS Powerpoint. Nope... just OpenGL in C.<p>Things like Office has always been bulky and slow. The funny thing is -- I bet Microsoft Powerpoint from 1997 would run EXTREMELY fast on todays hardware.<p>At home, I moved away from Microsoft and Windows since 2006-ish trying Ubuntu. I did experiment with Suse Linux before that but once home internet became solid.. so did Linux in my opinion. Sure, I still use Windows as my job requires it... and I can see Microsoft keeping their power&#x2F;control thanks to cloud&#x2F;azure and other things. Also, Excel has such as legacy to it that many people in Finance and other dept RELY on Excel! Point is many will stick with Windows because of that.<p>You have Valve helping Linux thrive in the gaming space. We need something that can help Linux thrive in the Office space. I am suprised there is not modern Spreadsheet application that takes us away from Excel. Sadly, you need a full DTP suite.

Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?

Derp.

Is the Office dev team part of the 30% id from AI?

It&#x27;s a great idea and the reason Microsoft are the biggest in the game. Kudos to them, I tip my hat! Here here!