Opening excel file directly is very slow

Anonymous

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

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Anonymous

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:

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

then SYSTEM

then CurrentControlSet

then Control

then Session Manager

then MemoryManagement ****then click PrefetchParameters

On the right side, double-click on EnableSuperfetch
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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84 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-10-09T22:19:15+00:00
I think I have the answer! I found it here:

http://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/11760-excel-files-open-very-slowly-4.html

Cortana is the culprit! After trying all of the above suggested fixes (and none working), this worked for me.

1. Open the Cortana app

2. In Settings, I turned off the top slider for "suggestions, ideas, etc." but left the lower one on, "search online..."

3. In Task Manager, right click and end the Cortana process. It will open right back up but doesn't seem to affect anything.

4. Excel files open again quickly!!

If you go to Task Manager before doing any of the above and double click an Excel file, you will see a Cortana Background Task Host begin when you double click an Excel file. Why that happens is beyond me but that slows things down. Follow steps 1-4 and that Task Host does not start anymore.

Now for Microsoft to fix it...

YES! THANK YOU!!!!!

I can confirm that this solution fixed the issue I was experiencing.

Same symptoms as described above in this thread:
- double-clicking on an excell file directly was taking 8-10 seconds to open (WINDOWS 10)
- opening the same file from within Excell APP when excell is already open: instant launch
After disabling CORTANA SUGGESTIONS, and quitting Cortana in Task Manager, double-clicking on an excell file opened Excel instantly.

What a strange bug...

PS. Excell 2007 here...
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Anonymous

2015-10-10T01:51:26+00:00

I think it's entirely fair to blame Cortana when the problem goes away after turning it off. I tested it a couple of times. Turn it on, and Excel files take about 10s to load. Turn it off, Excel files load immediately. Also, on or off, if I have Excel open and drag/drop the file to Excel, it opens immediately.

Maybe it's an interaction between the Windows shell and something. What is that something? In my case on Windows 10, it's Cortana. For Windows 7? There was a feature in Windows 7 (also exists in Windows 10) that allows one to perform searches of the contents of files, not just the names. Maybe it has something to do with file search? I don't know.

What I do know is that turning Cortana off definitely resolved my issue. It's Microsoft's job to figure out why that resolves the problem. ;-)
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Anonymous

2015-10-10T06:22:00+00:00

Exact same finding for me too! Goodbye Cortana - You'd have thought that as Microsoft want Business Users to use Windows 10 (and lets face it, Business Users did NOT want to use Windows 8) that given most Business Users use MS Excel that this bug would be on the priority list to sort out.

Having just upgraded MS Office 2013 to MS Office 2016 and the problem carrying over, I feel that illustrates it is a Win 10 issue and not an Office issue.

Come on Microsoft, listen to what your customers are pointing out and sort it, else they might not be your customers for much longer if you maintain this arrogance. No wonder your market share is declining.
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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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