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.
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> 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.