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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

I know that modern office has xlookup and other niceties, but if you're not a power user Office 97 off archive.org is like 200mb installed, works just fine on win 10 or under wine, and has the benefit of being written 28 years ago so on a modern computer everything happens imperceptibly fast. I installed the 97 suite like 2 or 3 years ago and I've never looked back.

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Is there a reason to use this over LibreOffice? I had until this year a pretty old machine (~11-12 years old at time of replacement, upper midrange at time of purchase) and I never felt like it was slow -- possibly because everything was slow on that machine though and I was stuck in a forest...

LibreOffice definitely feels sluggish.

I give it a pass because it's doing complicated things, it's free software and I also temper my expectations slightly because it's a Java GUI application (and I expect those to be slow).

I would certainly not expect it to be more performant than Office '97.

LibreOffice is derived from OpenOffice.org which is derived from StarOffice which predates Java. When it was acquired by Sun and open-sourced, they added some optional components implemented in Java, but the core application is not a Java application. The GUI is not Swing but their own custom GUI framework (not based on Java).

Libre/OpenOffice is a C++ application which uses an homegrown cross-platform GUI toolkit. There were only some minor components written in Java (like mail merge), and I believe LibreOffice has replaced some of them with native code.

I can't find references now, but Gnome or Ubuntu had a phase where they were booting the desktop with under 128MB of RAM.

It would be great if LibreOffice had a spurt of speed-ups. Kind what the browser wars also competed fiercely about.

LibreOffice may be slow, but is UI is not build in Java, 90+% of LibreOffice is built on C++.

Being written in Java there is no surprise here.

Java is optional, not used for any of the core office functionality. You can build and use LibreOffice completely without Java.

If you want LibreOffice with less Java, you should try Collabora Office. https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-now-av... (I'm not affiliated)

XLOOKUP is so nice though. The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway.

Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.

FWIW, both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice support XLOOKUP. In fact LibreOffice has over 500 Excel formulae, which is very close to the number of formulae Excel has.

Unless you use a lot of VBA (and you can't translate it to Python), or you've got some proprietary COM addin that you can't live without, LibreOffice's Calc is a pretty damn good replacement for Excel for the majority of users.

Office 2003 supports OOXML rather than the proprietary binary blobs that are office 97 formats.

Good to know! I pretty much only use it for excel w/ (C|T)SV files and to make word art so I hadn't noticed.

Honestly not sure I've ever used any of the new Office features past maybe Office 2000

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