[HN Gopher] Office 2000 is good to go
___________________________________________________________________
Office 2000 is good to go
Author : tosh
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-11-15 00:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com)
| jl6 wrote:
| Oh for the simplicity and consistency of Office 2000. I now live
| in the hell that is Office+SharePoint+Teams, where features churn
| at random intervals and nobody knows where anything is _really_
| stored.
|
| This is a real thing that happens to me regularly:
|
| Someone sends me an email with a spreadsheet attached. Except
| it's not an attachment, even though it looks like one. Needless
| to say I can't access it until I'm online. I get online and find
| that the attachment is actually some kind of link. I click it and
| it opens a web browser. Inside the browser is Teams. Then actual
| Teams opens, and inside Teams is a half-assed version of Excel. I
| can do some casual browsing around the spreadsheet, but I need
| real Excel to use it properly. There is a button to open the
| spreadsheet in Sharepoint, but I avoid that because I know it's a
| trap (Sharepoint is where the three-quarter-assed version of
| Excel lives). The button I need is "Open in Desktop App". And I
| finally get to use the spreadsheet. But apparently it is stored
| on Sharepoint? Or is it OneDrive? And Teams is actually
| Sharepoint behind the scenes anyway? Autosave will be turned
| either on or off, randomly, so maybe my edits are being auto-
| shared with other users? I guess I can get back to an old version
| because Sharepoint versioning is turned on. Or maybe it isn't? I
| can share the spreadsheet with a colleague, but I can choose to
| make it read-only - so how does that work? Have I now got two
| copies of it, a read-only one and a writeable one? Is it really
| my file anyway, since I got the link to it from someone else
| originally?
|
| (I do actually know the answers to some of the above questions,
| but what an utter farce it has become).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Everything I do is saved on sharepoint and onedrive. I don't
| know what the hell sharepoint is or how to access it or if it
| is even different than onedrive. but its happening at my
| institution so, hey.
|
| I always attach real docs to my emails though never the
| editable linky things, and I periodically rename my doc under
| different file names to preserve older versions, even though
| I've heard it keeps autosaved versions somewhere inside the
| document. I guess I just like the "physicality" of separate
| document files for security.
|
| All these things said, I actually like one-drive quite a bit.
| It allows me to easily switch between computers etc.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| You make me happy that my company is too skint to buy all those
| solutions: we're still sharing Office 2016 actual files by
| email (some poor souls are still on Office 2010).
|
| I uninstalled Teams from my PC (it was crashing) and only use
| it in Edge for the few confs I must participate in.
|
| Now if I could throw away my (yup still corded) phone and stop
| my colleagues from coming to my desk to interrupt me, I would
| be happy ;)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I still prefer 97, runs great in a VM, faster than LibreOffice,
| save the text with copy and paste into my blog with IE6. I can
| almost smell the shiny Plymouth Horizon on the parking lot.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Office 97 was their high point and I really didn't see the
| value proposition trying others which seemed like attempts to
| refactor the GUI every few years. That and no product
| activation. From a time when owning software meant owning it.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The invoice I bill with is from an Office 97 template. Thursday
| will be it's 25th birthday.
| Animats wrote:
| Word 97 was the last Microsoft product I purchased.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I believe some around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks
| of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done.
|
| Since then it seems they crammed more and more "intelligent"
| functions into the software that made them less predictable. I
| still don't know under what circumstances Windows Search finds
| things sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Lately Outlook search
| feels random. Teams search is a complete mess. When I write stuff
| in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all
| the time. Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because
| they are pushing OneDrive.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Completely agree. Office 2000 and Windows 2000 are probably my
| favorite Microsoft software of all time. They performed well on
| mid-range hardware (I ran them on Pentium II and III), were the
| best they've looked (imho), and let you get things done. For a
| long time I installed Windows 2000 in VMs for running older
| games and software, even into the Vista days.
|
| I would accept arguments that Office peaked between Word 6 and
| '98, but everything after Windows and Office 2000 were worse.
| XP's Luna was an ugly reaction to OS X's Aqua. Things kept
| getting slower and larger for no obvious addition of
| functionality.
|
| I've long since left Windows behind, but still have found
| memories of Microsoft circa 2000.
| moolcool wrote:
| XP's luna didn't run very deep though. XP was very similar in
| appearance to 2000 with a couple of minor settings tweaks
| xattt wrote:
| Classic mode was easy to turn on.
| bluedino wrote:
| A big part of this is mentioned in the article:
|
| > The biggest competition for Office 2000 was . . . Office 97.
|
| > We were so heads down finishing Office 2000 that we didn't
| realize how well received, and how good, Office 97 was.
|
| They had to keep introducing new shit to get people to upgrade.
| If your feature was the hot new feature, you got promoted. So
| everyone wanted to get their pet feature in, and the users
| lost.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I'd say 2003 is the last best version. It's the last version
| without ribbon and it is able to support OOXML with an addon.
| The UI experiments like partially hidden menus are all
| disableable if you don't want them.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Yeah, Office 2003 is the sweet spot. It's also the last
| version that installs entirely offline, without any attempts
| to sign in or phone home for verification.
| jankotek wrote:
| Win95 had very strict and consistent UI style. Office2k and
| Win2k were peak of this consistency. After that came WinXP and
| mismatch of inconsistent UI styles.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I've had to teach people to use PCs many times, it used to be
| _so_ much easier for this reason. You 'd teach someone that
| "this icon mean THIS" and that would be that, but today that
| is impossible because there are five different graphics/ideas
| for each thing (plus of course iconography used to use
| analogies from real-life, like a pen for Word, bin for
| throwing stuff away, folders, etc).
|
| Windows 10 never really reached self-consistency in six
| years, and it seems like Microsoft just doesn't care at this
| point with Windows 11 now just layering more contradictory
| concepts on the unfinished Windows 10 ones.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Its to the point where I'd rather have text than icons in
| the various menus.
| endgame wrote:
| Look at old pictures of (say) Netscape Navigator. Despite
| having far fewer pixels we somehow had enough to label
| our icons. What went wrong?
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| Globalization happened
|
| English "250 views" = 8 chars wide German "250 mal
| angesehen" = 17 chars wide
|
| English "FAQ" = 3 chars wide Portuguese "Perguntas
| frequentes" = 20 characters wide
|
| It isn't uncommon for english words to expand 200-300%
| when translated to other languages.
|
| I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version
| of netscape to see how they fit those labels
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I imagine that abbreviations are common in these
| languages?
| makecheck wrote:
| Yeah, and I'm terrified by the "new" UI Outlook keeps prompting
| me to "try", knowing that one day the old one will probably
| just go away.
|
| The new UI takes up way more space and completely messes up my
| preferred split-screen approach (e.g. instead of working in a
| 50/50 layout, the new UI basically forces the split to be more
| like 70/30 with _less useful stuff on screen_ ).
| chris_wot wrote:
| I just can't work out how to turn off "focused" inbox. I want
| me mail, and all of it!
| causality0 wrote:
| _Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are
| pushing OneDrive._
|
| Christ don't remind me. The galaxy-brains at my work decided
| every file on every PC needs to go into OneDrive on a constant-
| update basis. Between the fact we're still stuck using HDDs
| instead of SSDs and our network hitting 16 megabits per second
| on a good day, most people have managed to get an impressive
| amount of reading done while waiting for their PCs to do
| anything at all.
| Arrath wrote:
| We were recently notified that external USB storage will soon
| be banned, and to use OneDrive to transfer files.
|
| My question to IT of "Hey we have clients that explicitly
| only allow the use of their own (incredibly terrible) file
| transfer platform, and block OneDrive. We've been burning
| stuff to CD with a usb drive and hand delivering it, if you
| ban those wat do?"
|
| Got the form "this is how you use OneDrive" response back.
| Love it.
| miohtama wrote:
| Sounds like an organizational issue in your work place.
| Usually these are the best dealt by changing the employer.
| They rarely get fixed from within the organization itself.
| udev wrote:
| I am a Windows user since 3.11 (so 25+ years).
|
| I am yet to see a single instance when a troubleshooting wizard
| was not a complete waste of time.
| abraxas wrote:
| > When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and
| messes up formatting all the time
|
| This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is
| because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither
| style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can
| apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a
| structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror
| stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days
| of Word6/Word97).
|
| The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of
| Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software
| feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt
| they'd be where they are now in terms of market penetration.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would
| argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual
| usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give
| it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they'd get a mass
| of beginner/casual users that brought it with them into
| professional settings.
|
| Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really
| easy to use casually for making resumes/letters/etc. Excel is
| excellent for making lists of things and basic
| accounting/graphing.
|
| Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were
| formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C
| data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office
| formats (ending in "x" e.g. docx) are night-and-day better
| (they're standard zip files with boring XML files within).
| People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very
| not-intiminating.
| btilly wrote:
| Sorry, I have to give bonus points for, " _their ceaseless
| effort to make competing software feel inferior on their
| operating systems_. "
|
| The point where Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect was
| when Microsoft released Windows 95, which somehow broke
| WordPerfect, and refused to give Corel any access to it in
| advance of the release. By the time Corel had figured out
| how to make WordPerfect run 6 months later, it was too
| late, Microsoft Word was more widely used.
|
| Incidentally the original formats were literally a dump of
| in memory data structures. Which means that compatibility
| became a huge headache every time Microsoft tried to change
| its internal data structures. That's WHY they migrated to
| the docx format.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Targeting casual use was the key. Even in the
| "professional" world almost nobody uses the Office
| applications to their full extent. The people who can are
| using more appropriate software. Accountants have Intuit
| and Peachtree, Anyone working in graphics, design or
| typesetting will use the appropriate Adobe app or
| competitor. Power Point is probably the only member of the
| suite that doesn't have a more "professional" equivalent.
| But there are definitely people who are more adept with it
| in the business world.
|
| Office was probably feature complete in its second or third
| iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice
| are in interface overhauls.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "(they're standard zip files with boring XML files within)"
|
| that's the container format. But the actual document data
| is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable
| if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and
| Photoshop files are also a mess.
| phaedrus wrote:
| I was explaining to one of my coworkers how back in the day
| with WordPerfect you could click "Show Codes" (or whatever
| the menu option was called) and view all the embedded
| formatting tags as text rather than WYSIWYG. This made it
| incredibly easy to fix formatting issues and see what was
| wrong with an unintended interaction of styles. As people who
| had only ever used (read: fought with) Microsoft Word, they
| were mind-blown that such a thing once existed.
|
| We maintain technical documentation and have to manually
| track page changes, which ultimately results in physical
| pages being printed and replaced in physical binders in many
| facilities. Use of Microsoft Word for this purpose is sketchy
| as f--- because when Word decides to "go nuts" and slightly
| reformat the next 100 pages (or worse, even previous pages)
| because of a minor edit, it turns a single page change into a
| hundreds-of-pages change apocalypse.
|
| Of course we don't really let that outcome stand; what
| actually happens is an engineer (with occasional consultation
| of a documentation specialist) spends half a day tentatively
| prodding and undoing changes in an increasingly broken
| document trying to find a way through the maze that doesn't
| trigger either a formatting booby trap or Word's over-helpful
| malevolent AI.
|
| The key point here is without the ability to "show codes" and
| edit the real underlying structure of the document not the
| WYSIWYG view, the entropy just increases over time.
|
| We all agree that _Word is not the appropriate software for
| what we 're doing_. Unfortunately the people with the power
| to fix this situation are the furthest removed from
| understanding our pain, and we have decades' worth of Word
| docs. And since Microsoft Office is the default, even when
| Word breaks compatibility we don't take advantage of that
| opportunity to move to a real document management system,
| they just keep buying the next version of Office.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I used a portable version of Word 2003 for many many years. It
| would run off an old 128MB flash drive.
|
| The extra clicks every time you try to save anything in newer
| versions of Office before you can get to a file picker dialog
| is truly maddening.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| For basic document editing is as good now as ever. And it eats
| way less resources than the more modern conterparts.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Sinofsky was pretty grounded in the early days but I've heard
| during the Windows 8 development he was burying his head in the
| sand, surrounding himself with yes-men and pretending like all
| (internal) feedback about the idiotic design was coming from
| people "afraid of change" (yes, literally replied that to someone
| that sent him honest feedback about the product).
|
| The folks that came up with the "remove the start button" design
| in Windows 8 where the same PMs & designers that came up with the
| Ribbon in Office; and he knew early feedback about the Ribbon was
| mostly negative and yet in a short time it became very popular;
| so he must've thought the same thing was happening with the start
| menu (but as we know now, it wasn't, it was just very bad design
| - not "ahead of its time", just broken and idiotic).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Reading between the lines of enumerous blog posts, I think him
| and his yes man were also responsible for torpedoing Longhorn
| and replacing all .NET ideas with COM.
|
| So now we have to "enjoy" that since then all new APIs are COM
| based.
|
| It is going to take decades to undo this, if until then we
| don't move all into "Azure OS" and it stops being relevant.
| mavhc wrote:
| Breaking everything now to maybe win in the future is not
| Microsoft's way.
|
| Their way is: Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the
| new thing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It wasn't their way, nowadays ask anyone burned with XNA,
| Managed DirectX, Silverlight, C++/CX, WinRT 8, UAP 8.1,
| UWP, WCF,.... how they feel about Microsoft support.
| mavhc wrote:
| Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new
| thing.
|
| New thing fails, make a new new thing.
|
| So Managed DirectX was replaced with XNA.
|
| Silverlight was just MSFlash, although it used XAML which
| is still used today I assume.
|
| C++/CX was replaced with C++/WinRT
|
| WinRT the runtime started the sandboxing and ARM support
| path.
|
| What's UAP?
|
| UWP is still around, but again, no one cared because
| HTML5.
|
| And at least WCF is open source, although does anyone use
| it?
|
| At some point MS realised Windows wasn't important and
| moved to Azure.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Managed Direct X was replaced by an incompatible XNA,
| which was dropped on the floor, with the advice to learn
| C++ and move into DirectXTK.
|
| Silverlight was the app framework for Windows Phone 7 as
| well, dropped on the floor for Windows Phone 8.
|
| C++/CX was replaced by a junk framework that is basically
| ATL with a new name, with the same tooling as Visual C++
| 6.0 with ATL.
|
| UAP was the percusor for UWP.
|
| The "compatibility story" goes like this. Windows 8 drops
| all compatibility with former Windows, but WinRT requires
| rewriting the application three times, for phone, tablet
| and desktop, due to the API space.
|
| Windows 8.1 improves the situation by introducing UAP,
| where the views still have to be written three times, but
| the API space for business logic can be shared. Requires
| a rewrite from previous WinRT.
|
| Windows 10 introduces UWP, as consolidation of three
| platforms, requires a rewrite from previous WinRT.
|
| XAML islands get introduced as bridge between Win32 and
| UWP, a year later plan gets dropped and WinUI 3.0 gets
| introduced, and Project Reunion.
|
| Yet another year ensues, WinUi is now merged with Project
| Reunion as the Windows App SDK.
|
| Requires yet another rewrite.
|
| In the middle of this, .NET Native gets dropped, and .NET
| 6 still doesn't provide the same AOT capabilities.
|
| On the C++ side, a group of devs manages to kill C++/CX
| without any equivalent tooling, telling everyone
| complaining that customers should suck it up and wait for
| the day ISO C++ supports Herb Sutter's metaclasses ideas,
| so that they don't do any C++ extensions like C++/CX or
| god forbid Qt and C++ Builder.
|
| Lots of enterprises stuck with .NET Framework use WCF.
|
| As for Azure OS, lets see what the future holds, it isn't
| the only cloud OS in town.
| easton wrote:
| This is what frustrates me about Microsoft sometimes. They try
| to stick to backwards compatibility as much as possible, then
| once in a while they decide to change something, usually do it
| not great (Windows 8), then they have to have a goodwill
| recovery period where they can't break anything anymore. I
| think the backlash to 11's changes means we're probably stuck
| with the Windows 95 printer pane for another ten years.
|
| With the advent of high speed virtualization, it's okay to
| break stuff (shoot, they tried it with XP Mode in 7, don't know
| why they haven't tried it again). I don't know if we still need
| 20 years of compatibility.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I fondly remember Office 2000 as the last version that didn't
| require product activation.
| spapas82 wrote:
| I'm actually still using office 2000 at work. All my documents
| and sheets are generated with it (and I use it a lot to generate
| various bureocratic stuff).
|
| My only problem is the fact that it has difficulties opening docx
| and xlsx and it can't save them at all, so sometimes I may have
| problems exchanging docs with colleagues. But that's a small
| price to pay for its stability, speed and how much light weight
| it is! Also, it has no real copy protection! If you've got a
| serial you can install it to all your machines!
| a2tech wrote:
| Its wonderful to be able to double click on a document and have
| it essentially instantly open
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I still use Office 2000. On modern hardware, it opens faster than
| my mouse button finished coming up from the click on the icon. In
| an extremely un-microsoft-like move, a while ago microsoft
| released an add-on package for it called "office 2007 format
| converters" that makes it capable of opening and saving new
| xml+zip based formats.
|
| I recommend this setup to everyone. Fast, smooth, no ads, and
| works well.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Yeah, the speed of the older stuff was amazing - EVEN on older
| machines.
|
| Office 365 with the plugins now required at work / one drive
| etc - slow.
| lostgame wrote:
| There's no excuse for a word processor to be anything but. :(
| philsnow wrote:
| Every comment here is about peculiarities of Office versions, but
| the article gave me false nostalgia for working at a place like
| Microsoft in the late 90s / early 00s. Evil Empire-ness
| (are_we_the_baddies.gif) aside, I mean.
| yuhong wrote:
| Anyone remember the Access 2003 conversion toolkit? The
| conversion from Access 97 to Access 2000 was originally designed
| for developers, not conversions of large number of databases by
| end users.
| MatthiasWandel wrote:
| Still using office 2000. its simple and fast, never liked the
| later bells and whistles like the "ribbon". Sadly, windows 10
| doesn't get along with it perfectly well.
| knolan wrote:
| I find modern Office impossible to be productive with. Editing
| charts in Excel is a particular frustration having to dig into a
| few submenus to do something basic like change the style of a
| marker. Manipulating data ranges is nowhere as intuitive as it
| was in Office 2000.
|
| I don't do any real work with Office anymore. If I need a Doc
| file I'll export from Pages, even Numbers is generally better
| than excel for simple tasks and Keynote is much better than
| PowerPoint.
|
| These data it's much faster to fire up Matlab or Python can get
| actual work done.
| deergomoo wrote:
| As someone who spends most of his time in a text editor and
| only needs to use word processing/spreadsheets very
| occasionally, Office is absolutely torturous. Everything that's
| not achievable with a single click feels like it requires
| navigation through at least three modal sub-windows.
|
| It probably doesn't help that I'm mostly Mac-based, considering
| Microsoft have decided that things like _selecting text_ and
| _drag and drop_ should work differently to literally every
| other piece of software I use.
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| I've found Numbers to be basically unusable on iPad. May be
| because some stuff works differently as compared to excel but
| its features are literally buried inside icon based interface
| which is a huge bummer. Should give it a go on Mac, may be it's
| better there.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| It's not really any better -- while I haven't dug in too
| deeply, the current macOS versions are basically the iPad
| versions running in a window with a mouse pointer.
| ido wrote:
| I use google docs and although it's free it's actually much
| quicker to use than modern office (for me at least - maybe
| because the interface is more similar to 90s office!)
| jjkaczor wrote:
| I still miss the "Binder" application in Office 2000...
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| I'd be quite content to work with 2000 or 97 indefinitely.
| [deleted]
| post_break wrote:
| I miss buying office once and not having to tie it to a microsoft
| account, live in constant fear of it unregistering on an
| application server, resetting an office 365 user's password
| because it randomly stopped working. Office 2000 was so good I
| miss those times. It launched stupid fast, worked well, and I
| can't think of any bugs I ran into.
| srmarm wrote:
| I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't
| available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair
| few years.
|
| I still pay PS30 or so a year for the annual licence when it
| comes on sale just to be able to open docs natively though!
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| * Drawing canvases
|
| * The new fonts (Calibri etc.)
|
| * Proper biliography support (not as good as BibTeX etc. but
| good enough for many reports)
|
| * Proper math support (not as good as LaTeX but better than the
| old equation editor and good enough for many reports)
|
| Certainly the pace of change is radically slower than in the
| old days (like Word 6.0 and Word 95) but enough that it's
| usually nicer to use recent versions rather than older ones.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is
| already dated, it hasn't aged too well.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > Calibri is already dated, it hasn't aged too well.
|
| I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a
| lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't
| commonly come across something that's so much better that I
| wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something
| specific in mind?
|
| The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer
| Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years
| ago so if you feel that fonts "age" then you certainly
| won't like that one!)
| agumonkey wrote:
| I still like Calibri too. :)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I love Palatino, Garamond, and other timeless fonts. I
| just don't think Calibri is timeless at all.
|
| Calibri actually wasn't preceded by Arial; it was a
| replacement for Times New Roman, which was the previous
| default font in Microsoft Word. (They made the switch
| from Serif to Sans Serif.) Arial - apart from being the
| default font in Notepad and WordPad - was never really
| part of the Windows aesthetic. The new Windows font is
| Segoe UI (which I think has only improved with age)
| replaced MS Sans Serif, which was an altered version of
| Tahoma (introduced with Windows 95).
|
| If you use HN on Windows and are into fonts, I did a
| write up on two iconic fonts that are actually just one:
| https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/
|
| For my personal "brand", I was using Publico Text for a
| very long time, but now it seems to be everywhere so
| that's a bit of a bummer :)
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I suppose it depends on how you look at it. It used to be
| that the two main fonts were Arial and Times New Roman
| (and Courier New), then they switched to Calibri and
| Cambria (and Consolas). At the same time, as you say,
| they switched Word's default from serif to sans serif
| (because sans serif are better for on-screen reading, and
| the assumption about how documents would be read had
| changed). I'm sure we can agree on all those facts.
| Whether Calibri is a replacement for Arial or Times New
| Roman is just a matter of what we each mean by the word
| "replacment" and is not interesting.
|
| I think Calibri looks extremely readable on screen (at
| least on Windows with ClearType, which is what it was
| designed for). At the end of the day it's a matter of
| opinion.
|
| Your article on Tahoma and Verdana was very interesting!
| To veer a little further off topic: I was under the
| impression that those fonts, or at least Verdana, was
| primary designed for great readibility for very short
| text labels in dialogue boxes, so it does make me wince
| when I see them used for long documents, especially
| printed ones.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Thanks, and yes, we're in agreement. Have a look at Sitka
| [1], it's flown completely under the radar. It's
| specifically designed for on-screen readability and
| especially in longer texts with some studies done to
| boost comprehension (some tiny amount, I'm sure) as
| compared to Calibri and others. We're using that for our
| school's memos and letters to students and parents. I
| personally find it a nicer in-box alternative to Calibri,
| which just looks off to me.
|
| [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-
| list/sitka
| StevePerkins wrote:
| When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean
| "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a
| riff on some design that's been around for a century or
| more.
|
| Calibri replaced Times New Roman as Word's default font,
| because TNR had become ubiquitous (and because docs were
| starting to be read on-screen more than in-print, so
| switching to a sans-serif default made sense). But TNR is
| an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case
| (i.e. dense body text). Most of the commonly recommended
| alternatives (e.g. Baskerville and Garamond) pre-date it by
| decades or centuries, so it's hardly an "age" thing. It's
| just that readers don't see them as frequently as they do
| TNR.
|
| Even Calibri came along simply because Helvetica/Arial were
| "old". But Apple (well-respected for typography) still use
| Helvetica as the body text default in their office apps.
| And only the most pretentious of font snobs, who have
| carefully studied the capital "R" and "G", could tell the
| difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. I
| still think that Arial is a much nicer font than Calibri
| for body text. It just feels "old" because people have seen
| it on Wikipedia pages a million times.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| No, I meant dated as in "the novelty of it wore off and
| without that it doesn't stand on its own two feet." (If
| you read my other replies, you'll find that we are
| probably in complete agreement.)
|
| I probably qualify as a font snob (although hopefully not
| a pretentious one). Either/both of Arial or Helvetica are
| better designed than Calibri. Arial is available with
| some "fixes" as Arial Nova for free on the MS Store.
| Georgia, used everywhere as it is/was, will never be old
| or dated in my lifetime (but there's a Georgia Pro with
| more weights and some changes to hinting available for
| free on the MS Store). Tahoma/Verdana [1] has aged
| beautifully and remains excellent for the web (as
| evidenced by its use on HN) - it's also permanently
| associated in my mind with being the MS Encarta body font
| long before Wikipedia was a thing.
|
| All but Arial were designed by the one and only Matthew
| Carter.
|
| (Times New Roman was certainly overused and elicits some
| unpleasant gut reactions thanks to its guilt by
| association with poorly formatted and improperly typeset
| Word documents but is nevertheless still a classic - and
| of course its core origins long predate the web.)
|
| [1]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/
| zamadatix wrote:
| Real time co-authoring with the cloud save locations is a
| killer for me as it got rid of a bunch of "<x> final copy (3)
| FINAL - Jim's edits" crap. I think that was 2016 initially I
| think but it's gotten improvements since. But for single user
| "I want to edit a document" there isn't much to add since 2000.
| agumonkey wrote:
| some cute things have been added
|
| - pre emptive auto fill based on context
|
| - sparklines (tiny graph in a cell)
|
| - cute conditional formatting UI
|
| - some web data fetching can be of use if your sheet is dealing
| with external / world data
| justin66 wrote:
| I am glad the author's habit of weirdly abbreviating the names of
| people in the text, regardless of whether the reader is likely to
| know them, is not widespread. BradCh, MikeMap, ScottRa, etc.
|
| At least Dave Cutler gets to have a real name in this story.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > The biggest competition for Office 2000 was . . . Office 97.
|
| And this is why Microsoft and Adobe are both pushing their
| products entirely over to subscriptions which stop working if you
| stop paying: They really don't do anything from version to
| version that justifies the cost or effort in upgrading.
|
| Subscription pricing for desktop software is an incredible way to
| tell your customers you have a lot of employees to feed that
| don't really do much to deliver new value to the customer.
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