Opening excel file directly is very slow

Anonymous
2013-02-26T12:25:10+00:00

I can open Excel directly and it launches immediately - not an issue.

I can launch Excel directly and then open a file - it opens the file immediately.

However if I open a file directly - without previously launching excel - it takes a long time - 30 to 40s.

I have tried many suggestions found online but none help. Does anyone have any ideas please?

Win 7 64 Bit

Office 2010

Thanks

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2013-03-02T00:50:36+00:00

Solved.......I worked it out from searching the internet.

The issue is Superfetch. Mine was switched off.

As soon as it was turned on from Regedit followed by me starting it in Services - it works perfectly!

Here is the text from the solution....

I found this on Technipages website:

Mitch wrote:

"Superfetch caches data to RAM so that it can be immediately available to your application. Sometimes this can affect the performance of certain applications. It tends to not work well with gaming, but can improve performance with business apps.

To modify whether Superfetch is enabled or disabled, you can perform the following steps:

  1. Click the Start orb and type REGEDIT in the Start Search area.
  2. Open the Registry Editor.
  3. Click the plus sign next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

then SYSTEM

then CurrentControlSet

then Control

then Session Manager

then MemoryManagement ****then click PrefetchParameters

  1. On the right side, double-click on EnableSuperfetch
  2. Give it one of the following values:

0 to disable Superfetch

1 to enable prefetching when program is launched

2 to enable boot prefetching

3 to enable prefectching of everything

Hit OK then Close RegEdit. "

Then goto the services MSC ("windows key + r" or just "windows key" and type services.msc). Scroll down to Superfetch and now should start. Click Start on the left info pane or double click it and change to automatic, then attempt to start again.

For informational purposes I chose the 4th option to enable prefetching for everything.

Hope this helps.

A.J. Silverman

MCSE+I, MCP, A+

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-11-05T16:17:31+00:00

    Add my name to the list.

    OS : Win7 pro

    Software : Office365Business (excel 2016)

    Problem : opening excel files is slow (small excel files with no coding vba etc), opening excel alone is fast. opening files from inside excel is fast. Files are local.

    Any update on this for windows 7 users ?

    We are using Office365 in our enterprise and i just noticed this delay on my system the other day... thankfully noone has come to me to complain yet....if several of our users become affected and request resolution we will have to escalate with microsoft support which no doubt will be quite tedious.

    I will uninstall/reinstall today and see if there is any improvement. If not i will install Office2013 for testing. 

    Quite the annoyance.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-20T23:52:30+00:00

    I don't think this is a solution because the settings you recommend are already how mine are set.

    I did go and change my settings to something else, and then set them back, and the spreadsheet did open really fast; however, once I closed Explorer, it was slow again. I think perhaps the speed up we're seeing has something to do with having the Preview view open and the file previewed, before trying to open it. I was able to toggle fast/slow just by having the file I wanted to open previewed.

    That said, I went to my Surface 3 Pro machine that runs the Insider Build 10565 and the Excel files opened really fast, and this same machine and build was opening them slowly just yesterday. No changes, no preview. Then I found another sheet on that machine that was slow, the first time I opened it, and then fast the second. I'm totally not understanding this.

    Edited to add:

    I just updated my desktop machine to Insider Build 10565, and all the sheets are opening fast for now.

    Updated to add:

    I put on another update, and now they're slower than ever.

    Updated to add:

    And now it's fast again.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-20T19:17:43+00:00

    I have had this problem and think i found the answer by accident.

    I am running Windows 10 and Office 2010.

    Try this:

    Open the folder where your file is then go to view on the top menu.

    Select  the "preview pane" option.

    Then go to "options" at the right hand end, click on it to open

    and then select "change folder and search options" Under "General"in the folder options change the following :

    open file explorer to : "quick Access"

    Browse folders : select "Open each folder in the same window"

    Ok to close.

    Now try opening your Excel files and they should pop up straight away.

    This worked OK for me.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-11T01:11:03+00:00

    While I am not completely certain, I believe that the way Excel is opened from Explorer is the problem. Word opens documents through a path name passed by Explorer, while /DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) is the execution argument for Excel. One of the solutions that works for some is to change the registry entry not to use /DDE. My suspicion is that those for which this solution didn't work just failed to find all of the /DDE Excel entries in the registry (there can be a lot of them depending on how many versions of Office have been installed on the machine.

    Let me add that Office 2016 on the latest Insider build of Windows 10 still has this problem.

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