This is old news.
I don’t even understand what’s being added to these programs anway, lol.
For most purposes Office 2003/2007 would be fine even nowadays, unless you do some crazy stuff in Excel I guess.
The newer versions have Office365 in it, which makes it easier to administer for large companies. That is also the big customer base for them, which means a lot of legacy support bloating the entire thing, while it mostly runs of slower web technology, rather then being native.
Yeah but how could they sell you on subscription services and ‘new features’ if you just keep using the old one?
Bit like buying a new car for no other reason than “it’s new”.
That said, in 2018~ i had to modernize an MS Access 2003 database and about lost my mind so there’s a case for everything i suppose.
Excel bloat has gotten so bad I learned Python because I was sick of trying to come up with workarounds to make Excel handle moderately sized datasets without crashing. Now I just write python scripts to do anything I need and if I need to show my work to someone who doesn’t use Python I just export my data to Excel and copy over the last few steps in Excel to show how it works. It’s still faster than doing everything in Excel.
Ok but you could also try LibreOffice, its probably much faster than microsofts office.
https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/
At least on my Linux machine, it starts quick and does what I need.
Yeah sure let me get my Fortune 500 employer to switch over to libreoffice that’s a solution.
But seriously though libreoffice is okay if you’re doing very basic stuff, but it’s even jankier than Excel in the circumstances I described minus the background usage just from opening the app.
Optimise the program? Nah. Make it start on boot instead!
Oh good, I always wanted something in the background eating more memory than my 42 browser tabs.