Word and Excel slow to load

Kendall80

Use Kingsoft Office instead. Free to download and quick to use.

bsod

A machine does not need 8GB (or anywhere near that) of ram to load office or run Windows speedily, which is why a ram upgrade makes no difference. Nor does it need a better cpu, an ssd, a different office suite, linux, or complete replacement.

The reason it's slow to load is most likely something (software or settings) is screwed up, not the hardware spec of the machine, that has been the case for as long as PC's have been around. Initial loading of any program from a local hard disk should take 4 or 5 seconds max, if it takes longer something is amiss

Finding the exact cause may be difficult. Office starter (if it's using click to run with a Q: drive?) tries to access the net and update on startup, that procedure may have far more to do with the load speed than anything else, is it connected to the net, does it have a q: drive? Are you timing the load of an existing spreadsheet or document, or the load of the program from a shortcut? Have you run any registry cleaners on this machine - they can delete important registry pointers which leads to slow loads. Any recent printer changes? Does it do it with another user profile (create a new user)? Is excel/word slow to load in safe mode (hold down the control key when clicking the excel/word link to find out).

Try unchecking all the privacy options under excel/word, file, options, trust center, trust center settings to limit the amount of "talking to microsoft across the net without your knowledge" stuff going on in the background.

Registry, file, and tcp/ip tracing may point to the cause, but if it came with office starter pre-installed, a disk image backup somewhere (in case the next step screws up), followed by factory restore is often the easiest solution, assuming you've googled the problem already, and tried a system restore to before it started playing up.

pd001

bsod wrote: »

A machine does not need 8GB (or anywhere near that) of ram to load office or run Windows speedily, which is why a ram upgrade makes no difference. Nor does it need a better cpu, an ssd, a different office suite, linux, or complete replacement.

The reason it's slow to load is most likely something (software or settings) is screwed up, not the hardware spec of the machine, that has been the case for as long as PC's have been around. Initial loading of any program from a local hard disk should take 4 or 5 seconds max, if it takes longer something is amiss

Finding the exact cause may be difficult. Office starter (if it's using click to run with a Q: drive?) tries to access the net and update on startup, that procedure may have far more to do with the load speed than anything else, is it connected to the net, does it have a q: drive? Are you timing the load of an existing spreadsheet or document, or the load of the program from a shortcut? Have you run any registry cleaners on this machine - they can delete important registry pointers which leads to slow loads. Any recent printer changes? Does it do it with another user profile (create a new user)? Is excel/word slow to load in safe mode (hold down the control key when clicking the excel/word link to find out).

Try unchecking all the privacy options under excel/word, file, options, trust center, trust center settings to limit the amount of "talking to microsoft across the net without your knowledge" stuff going on in the background.

Registry, file, and tcp/ip tracing may point to the cause, but if it came with office starter pre-installed, a disk image backup somewhere (in case the next step screws up), followed by factory restore is often the easiest solution, assuming you've googled the problem already, and tried a system restore to before it started playing up.

Thanks for all of that, much appreciated

Fightsback

bsod wrote: »

A machine does not need 8GB (or anywhere near that) of ram to load office or run Windows speedily, which is why a ram upgrade makes no difference. Nor does it need a better cpu, an ssd, a different office suite, linux, or complete replacement.

That's not entirely true as recently opened and closed programs/libraries are much more likely to remain in RAM and do not need to be recalled from disk.

Oblivion

pd001 wrote: »

According to my wife she has both Microsoft word and excel on her laptop. They are both very slow to load. However once loaded they seem to run fine.

I experience exactly the same thing ... using Office 2013 on a Dell Workstation with 32 bit Windows 7 Ultimate. I know that my hard drive and my memory are both a bit slow, so it is to be expected, but there is an awful lot of bloat in the more recent versions of Office.

If I intend to do some intensive work on several spread sheets or correspondence, I simply open the program once and leave it running, opening and closing documents as needed. One thing I have done recently is to trawl through all my old .doc and .xls files and resave them in .docx and .xlsx format respectively. Not only are the files now physically smaller (and hopefully future proofed) but they load in noticeably faster.

JCott

I find that it's particularly difficult to load files / getting Word/Excel to load them if you haven't cleaned out your autorecovery registry. Typically you must try to keep the registry cleaned out (when your software crashes it generates this) Also, depending on the add-ons or plugins you have enabled, it can also cause your software to startup slow. So first order of things should be to delete your Registrey Key Document Recovery (Should be somewhere in \Software\Microsoft\Office\x.x\Common\Resiliency

IronWolf

1 minute to load Word? Dont get an SSD, this isnt an HDD issue there is something else wrong here, it shouldnt be taking that long to load and an SSD, although great, probably wont solve the problem.

Have you tried buying a proper copy of Office 2010?

Oblivion

I wonder if it's taking time logging in to a Microsoft account. I've chosen not to have an active open online MS account and use Office in 'standalone' local mode only.

pd001

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread (so far). It has been most informative.
Please do keep your thoughts coming.
I have been through the whole thread and pressed all everyone's 'thanks' button

paddyrg

Add-ons can be very heavy, the box.com one takes an age in itself, so check for and suitable any she has. I also suspect the software logging into Microsoft or one drive will show things up. That said, my current laptop is a bit of a slouch itself when opening Word out Excel, despite being under a year old it has a bit of a slower hard drive than I'm used to. It's not a minute to start them up, but it is long enough for me to grumble about how long it takes to start them...