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Comment by csdvrx | Hacker News Reader

It's extremely efficient: cold starting Word from an old Office suite is much faster than starting Libreoffice. It also uses less RAM.

A few years ago I purchased a few shrink-wrapped Office on ebay for each of the versions Wine claimed to support best, tested then with wine32 and wine64, and concluded the "sweet spot" was Office 2010 in wine32 (it may have changed, as wine keep evolving)

Yes, it's 15 years old software, but it works flawlessly with Unicode xkb symbols! Since it doesn't have any network access, and each app is isolated in a different user id, I don't think it can cause any problem.

And Ii I can still use vim to do everything I need and take advantage of how it will not surprise me with any unwanted changes, I don't see why I couldn't use say an old version of Excel in the same way!

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It is interesting seeing Office suites from the 90s and wondering what really needed improved. Google Docs pioneering “auto saving” in the cloud is the only one I can think of.

> wondering what really needed improved

Maybe not much?

A few months ago, I ran out of power (my mistake, I use full screen apps to avoid the distraction, so I didn't realize I was unplugged)

After plugging in and restarting Linux then the ancient version of Word I was using, I got a pleasant surprise: the "autosaved" version of the document I was editing, with nothing lost!

As for llm, Excel 2010 may not have been made for AI, but wine copy/paste and a few scripts work surprisingly well!

Autosave has been part of Excel for ages. I had it enabled back in the early 1990s with the version that was distributed alongside Word 6 as part of Office 4.3 (I don't remember the Excel version number).

Current Excel Autosave when used with ODSP is different -- changes are individually autosaved (change cell, autosave, format table, autosave). They're completely transparent to the end user.

Word is similar.

So you're saying you're using Word 2010 and have no problem with files created recently? I find it surprising that modern word .docx is compatible with 15 year old Word

Not too suprising though. It is zipped xml. Future versions may add to the xml optional nodes that can be ignored by previous versions.

The modern Word suite’s basic format was introduced with Word 2010. So as long as the person who created the doc uses features that were previously present in Word 2010 they’d be fine.

Features from later versions will either not show up or show up as boxes

Collaborative editing? "Track Changes" just doesn't hit the same way.

That’s a good one. Perhaps Google Docs is the pinnacle of office suites.

The auto-save in Google Docs is undoubtedly better, but it was possible to set an auto-save interval in minutes on Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1.

Back then, Word's auto-save updated the file that you were working on rather than creating a separate backup file. I liked that better, though there might have been a good reason for changing approaches in later versions of Word.

> and each app is isolated in a different user id

I always liked this idea; but wouldn't you run into issues with file permissions? And if not, wouldn't that mean that the program in question would have access to all your files anyhow, removing the benefit of isolation?

When I'm using Office, the files come from a shared directory accessible as Z:

I use scripts to automate everything - including allowing wine to use Xwayland (because until I start the application I want, its userid is not allowed to show content on my display)

If you want to try using wine with different user ids, try to start with a directory in /tmp like /tmp/wine which is group writable, with your windows app and your user belonging to the same group.

Cool, hoping this will become more common and easier done with help from distro's!

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