[wodenokoto]

We were all impressed with google docs, but office.com is way more impressive.

Collaborative editing between a web app, two mobile anpps and a desktop app with 30 years of backwards compatibility and it pretty much just works. No wonder that took a lot of JavaScript!

[esperent]

We use MS Teams at my company. The Word and Excel in the Windows Teams app are so buggy that I can almost never successfully open a file. It just times out and eventually shows a "please try again later" message nearly every time. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the Teams app four or five times trying to fix this.

We've totally given up any kind of collaborative document editing because it's too frustrating, or we use Notion instead, which for all it's fault, at least the basic stuff like loading a bloody file works...

[acdha]

This is specific to your company’s configuration - likely something related to EDR or firewall policies.

[esperent]

I'm the one who set it up. It's a small team of 20 people. I've done basically no setup beyond the minimum of following docs to get things running. We've had nonstop problems like this since the very start. Files don't upload, anytime I try to fix it I'm confronted with confusing error messages and cryptic things like people telling me "something related to EDR". What the hell is EDR? I just want to view a Word doc.

I've come to realize that Teams should only be used in large companies who can afford dedicated staff to manage it. But it was certainly sold to us as being easy to use and suitable for a small company.

[acdha]

EDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endpoint_detection_and_respons...

I mentioned that because security software blocking things locally or at the network level is such a common source of friction. I don’t think Teams is perfect by any means but the core functionality has been quite stable in personal use, both of my wife’s schools, and my professional use so I wouldn’t conclude that it’s hopeless and always like that.

[esperent]

Thank you, I appreciate the support. But this doesn't explain the intermittent nature of the issues. For example, just now I tried to open a word file. I got the error message. But then I tried several times and restarted the app twice, and eventually the file did load. It just took five+ minutes of trying over and over.

I also had to add a new user yesterday, so I went to admin.microsoft.com in Edge. 403 error. Tried Chrome and Firefox. Same. Went back to Edge and suddenly it loaded. The like an idiot I refreshed, 403 error again. Another 5 or six refreshes and it finally loaded again and I was able to add the new user. There's never any real error messages that would help me debug anything, it's just endless frustration and slowness.

[bubblesnort]

Really it's anyone using teams on older or cheaper hardware.

[acdha]

So you’ve tested this with clean installs on unfiltered networks? Just how old is your hardware? It works well on, say, the devices they issue students here so I’m guessing it’d have to be extremely old.

[matrss]

> [...] and it pretty much just works.

I beg to differ. Last time I had to use PowerPoint (granted, that was ~3 years ago), math on the slides broke when you touched it with a client that wasn't of the same type as the one that initially put it there. So you would need to use either the web app or the desktop app to edit it, but you couldn't switch between them. Since we were working on the slides with multiple people you also never knew what you had to use if someone else wrote that part initially.

[hu3]

could it be a font issue?

[matrss]

If I remember correctly I had created the math parts with the windows PowerPoint app and it was shown more or less correctly in the web app, until I double clicked on it and it completely broke; something like it being a singular element that wasn't editable at all when it should have been a longer expression, I don't remember the details. But I am pretty sure it wasn't just a font issue.

[ezst]

That's the thing, though, the compat story is terrible. I can't say much about the backwards one, but Microsoft has started the process of removing features from the native versions just to lower the bar for the web one catching up. Even my most Microsoft-enamoured colleagues are getting annoyed by this (and the state of all-MS things going downhill, but that's another story)

[lostlogin]

> That's the thing, though, the compat story is terrible.

It really is. With shared documents you just have to give up. If someone edits them on the web, in Teams, in the actual app or some other way like on iOS, it all goes to hell.

Pages get added or removed, images jump about, fonts change and various other horrors occur.

If you care, you’ll get ground into the earth.

[tinco]

To be fair, we were impressed with Google Docs 15 years ago. Not saying office.com isn't impressive, but Google Docs certainly isn't impressive today. My company still uses GSuite, as I don't like being in Microsoft's ecosystem and we don't need any advanced features of our office suite but Google Docs and the rest of the GSuite seem to be intentionally held back to technology of the early 2010's.

[alexanderchr]

Google docs certainly haven't changed much the last 5-10 years. I wonder if that's an intentional choice, or if it is because those that built it and understand how it works are long gone to work on other things.

[jakub_g]

Actually I did see a few long awaited improvements landing in gdocs lately (e.g. better markdown support, pageless mode).

I think they didn't deliver much new features in early 2020s because they were busy with a big refactoring from DOM to canvas rendering [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858

[sexy_seedbox]

No more development? Time for Google to kill Google Docs!

[fulafel]

What's impressive is that MS has such well trained customers that it can get away with extremely buggy and broken web apps. Fundamental brokenness like collaborative editing frequently losing data and thousand cuts of the more mundane bugs.

[coliveira]

You must be kidding about "just works". There are so many bugs in word and excel that you could spend the rest of your life fixing. And the performance is disastrous.

[Cthulhu_]

> No wonder that took a lot of JavaScript!

To the point where they quickly found the flaws in JS for large codebases and came up with Typescript. I think. It makes sense that TS came out of the office for web project.