Posts by CGarison

My Microsoft Office 365 woes: Constant crashes, malware macros – and settings from Hell

Re: "if the shit does hit the fan"

I had a 'licensing issue' arise on my PC Sunday night and ended up having to re-install the OS and everything from scratch including MS Office. On my MAC, my Office constantly fails if the computer is not connected to the internet to validate the licensing although I have not had to reinstall the software due to a license validation issue yet. But in the case of the PC, the installer software has been buggy in the past and common functionality (like clicking a file to open the corresponding Office application) has failed due to the Office 2016 to Office 2013 upgrade process not working in Windows 10. In order to sort out that mess, it took a clean install of the OS to get 2016 to install correctly. Not a great product if you ask me.

Re: Speed

This issue began in Office 2013 and has become progressively worse in Office 2016. I am running an Intel 4790K with 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD and office is constantly lagging and never has the ability to use the full resources of the PC. RAM usage (regardless of size of document/spreadsheet) always maxes out at 2GB and use of multiple threads on my PC never grabs more than 25% of the available power. Even changing the windows settings does not substantially increase the performance of the application until you give 100% of the resources to Word, Excel, or Access and then you give up control pf all of the other functions of the PC. Microsoft has laid another big turd with Office 2016 and they have never talked to power users to make Office great again. Instead, power users are getting gimped versions of the program that are more suited to run on new, low powered tablet hardware and not the big huge PCs that we have to perform a tremendous amount of work. It is for this reason that I am looking at dropping Microsoft as my primary OS and move to Linux and Mac to run MS Office in a VM due to the fact that throwing more CPU and RAM at MS Office has done noting to improve the performance of the application.

Visio and Project are the only thing keeping me tied to Windows

Microsoft Office has been on a steady decline since it peaked with the 2003 version released 16 years ago. MS came close with office 2010, but key functions in that product (like spreadsheet sort functions) had issues and did more to damage my documents and data instead of producing spectacular results. The big decline in MS Office quality came with the 2013 release and then the 2016 release put a nail in this products coffin. Setting that don't stay, and obsolete mail client that does not have a unified inbox and functionality that changes from platform to platform are all reasons why I question my investment in this application as my licensing expense for our data analysis based research small business is far exceeding the applications usefulness to handle many documents or spreadsheets at once or handle extremely large sets of data. Yes, OneDrive is nice in that it lets me open documents on my Mac, PC, Android, and iOS devices, but the process of getting documents stored to the cloud is tedious and the versioning on the software has occasionally run into bugs since the 2016 software release. Personally, I feel like the quality of Office 2016 is about on par with the initial release of Windows 10 Insider Preview in September 2014 and the worst part is that Microsoft has done nothing to fix the issues with this product over the last year since it's full product release. Combine that with issues where I have had to reinstall my OS due to licensing cock-ups on Microsoft's end and I have grown tired of dealing with these products for simply Visio and Project. Something has to be better for people who need to do lots of work. And the troubles of the teams that I support that develop plug-ins for MS-Office, HA! It has been a year and we have barely cracked the changes to get the applications plugins to work with office versions newer than Office 2013. I am not sure what they are smoking in Redmond these days, but Microsofts products have done nothing but go off a cliff into near un-usability since Satya Nadella took the reins of this company.

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

Tech Preview User since October

Microsoft posted on the corner of my desktop a link with the question "Would you recommend Windows 10 to a friend?" My answer was "not likely" in bubbles and then I explained that the interface was far to buggy and not ready for a professional work environment. I also explained that in the case of my mother, she could live with those bugs and work just fine as long as she has a start menu that looks like a start menu.

So that sums it up. If you have real business to do, Windows 10 is not for you. If you are putzing around on a home PC or a really experience business user than can quickly work around the bugs and issues (like we did with Windows 95 when it was first released) then Windows 10 is for you.

Windows 10 feedback: 'Microsoft, please do a deal with Google to use its browser'

Need to Fix Feedback App

I have been using the Tech Preview and have never been able to use the feedback app and find it a disgrace that my issue has done nothing but fallen on deaf ears when posted in the forums along with the other people that have had this problem.