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
    2015-09-24T16:34:28+00:00

    I concur with Kevin. My computer has exactly same config and behavior. It takes more than 30 seconds for

    an xlsx file to open with double click. I have an i7 with SSD and speed is not a problem. All other MS Office programs run lightning fast... Sometimes I think I didn't do the double click only to have three times the file opened half a minute later.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-09-30T09:05:50+00:00

    I can confirm that disabling the "suggestions, ideas, etc." menu option resolved the slow opening of excel files for me.  Definitely something strange happening between Windows Explorer, Cortana, and Excel.  Turning that off completely resolved the issue.

    I can definitely say it's somewhere between Windows Explorer and Cortana, because if I open a command prompt and manually run Excel like this:

    "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15\EXCEL.EXE" file.xlsx

    I have no startup delay.

    Anyway, turning off that part of Cortana seemed to fix it.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-08T23:29:14+00:00

    Thanks for confirming my findings...

    Cheers!

    John

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-09T17:07:38+00:00

    Quite amazing that over four (4 !!) years now, so many contributors posted solutions that for some work but not for the majority.  Also interesting to see how some people quickly jump to conclusions as "it's Cortana's fault".  Cortana may be the trigger for some users, but I believe it is not the root cause.  Why? Because the issue exists running Windows 7.

    Even more interesting is the lack of interest from Microsoft.

    Every poster has a different twist.  In my case, I find that a reboot after a Windows Update will have a different impact from one reboot to the next on the load time when clicking an Excel file.  I had been down to 4-5 seconds for quite a while, as opposed to sub seconds when Excel.exe is already loaded, and then after a recent Windows Update reboot I am back up to 10 seconds.  What has changed?  Hard to say.

    So why is it only happening when clicking Excel files and not Word, Project, PowerPoint?

    When I monitor excel.exe from process creation to seeing the spreadsheet, ~2 seconds elapse (when clickin on Excel file).  The other 8 seconds would tend to point to some Windows process (DDE ?), but it's hard to set the trace attributes without getting flooded.

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