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

Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!

For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option.

On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years.

I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.

If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.

Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.

If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.

LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks.

Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.

Check out Only Office

Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.

That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this feature would be useless for them.

I don’t like Windows. And it is baffling to me that startup speed is a figure-of-merit nowadays given how absurdly fast drives have gotten.

With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).

Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.

Probably a corporate machine vs personal desktop divide. My corporate windows laptop has so much security/keylogger/spyware crap that time to unlock is ridiculous.

I'm actually not sure why so many people are saying it's slow.

For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my password.

I think the way macOS and Windows loads stuff after login is a bit different though.

Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.

For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.

That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)

At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported.

Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back.

Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?

The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer machines so it’s not part of their bottom line. They have little incentive to care as long as it’s not so slow their monopoly breaks.

It feels like they’ve always taken the approach: “Why rewrite anything when we can just add more virtualization?” In the short term, that might help ensure compatibility with older versions with minimal testing. But after 40-something years, it’s clear that it’s become a mountain of technical debt—one that Microsoft has no real plans to tackle any time soon.

I'd say that Office 97 was the pinnacle. I think you can still reasonably use it if you happen to have a copy.

This is of course problematic if you receive documents from other users :(