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Comment by smelendez

7 days ago

I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.

I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.

What do you mean lately? I remember Office apps always looking and behaving a bit off ever since, like, Office 2000. For some reason, they seem to have never quite embraced the design language of the current Windows version, even though they're in-house apps.

Now, the latest version of whatever the suite is called this second is a web page in some weird browser window, which has some rather funny failure modes [0]. What makes this all the more ridiculous is that running them in actual full-blown browsers is a better experience.

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[0] I'm specifically thinking of New Outlook, which, sometimes, kinda hangs, but not completely. It will fail to either fetch new mail or update the view with the new mails (can't tell which it is), but the view isn't actually broken! You can click around, select different mails and it will show the contents, move around folders—everything looks fine! Except no new mail comes in. And then, you want to, say, maximize or minimize the window. But you can't! The window controls don't react at all to the mouse! You obviously need to "end task" and restart that crap to get it working again.