Office 2016 slow to launch

Anonymous

All the Office 2016 applications are very slow to launch, e.g. Word take 60 seconds. Advice?

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Anonymous

Thanks for everyone's help with this. I'm sticking with 2011 for now...

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Anonymous

I may have found a fix to this problem. I believe the Keychain entries for Office were corrupt, duplicative or otherwise problematic.

Fix:

I open one of the Office apps (Word in my case) and signed out completely from Office 365 and OneCloud (I have a personal account as well as an Office 365 OnceCloud account).

I closed Word (no Office apps are now open). I opened Keychain Access, searched for any entries in Keychain with the word "microsoft" in it. I had several entries related to Office and OneDrive/Office 365. I deleted all of them.

I opened Word again, signed into Office 365/OneDrive. I then opened each of the other Office 2016 apps (Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote; I do not use Outlook but open it, too, if you do) one at a time. In each instance the icon will bounce in the Dock for a quite a bit then a dialog box will appear asking you to allow access to a keychain entry (multiple entries if you are signed into multiple accounts like me); reply "always allow" to each dialog box request and the app will finish opening.

After doing this for each Office app (and closing each app), I opened each app again and the time to launch was significantly shorter; in fact, what I would call "normal".

I rebooted my Mac and launched Office apps again. This time no app requested keychain access and each launched quickly. The second launching was very fast indeed.

I recognize this may not be the root cause for everyone's posted issue, but I hope this approach may help others. In any case, it does not assume you use an AV application or anything at all. Period. Every Mac uses Keychain, so this is likely a fix that can work for may people who have slow app launch issues.

Thank you Campy11. Your solution worked for me.

I, recently, upgraded from Office 2011 to Office 2016 in preparation for upgrading my Mac to High Sierra. No complaints (so far) about 2016. When the apps are open, they're working smoothly. But the act of, actually, opening them was taking forever. Maybe 30-60 seconds after dozens of bounces in the dock. Quitting the apps was, also, unusually slow. A quit would close all of the app windows, but I noted that it would take, maybe, 15-20 seconds before the indicator next to the icon in the dock would go away.

I thought that I had, completely, uninstalled 2011. However, when I went into Keychain Access, I noted that I, still, had a couple of keychains that would have been associated with the older version of Office. I suppose those could have been borking things. I deleted all the Microsoft keychains and relaunched the apps one-by-one. I never got a dialog box asking for keychain access. I, only, had to log back in to the first app that I relaunched. I was, automatically, logged back in to the others upon relaunching.

Now, the apps are launching after a handful of bounces and quitting is instantaneous. Close enough to "normal" to please me.

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Anonymous

OK you finally convinced me to look at the security programs. I turned off Norton Security - no change, still 30 second initialization times. Quit Malwarebyes (Premium), up comes do you want Malwarebytes to change your system --> YES, start Word 2016 and my god I am back to 5 second program loads/initializations. It must be Malwarebytes Premium!! Restart machine to see if Malwarebytes was uninstalled when I checked the Quit Malwarebytes option (right click on Malwarebytes system tray icon). No, as expected Malwarebytes is back in the fold after the restart (I didn't uninstall since I wasn't asked to uninstall Malwarebytes Premium, just quit Malwarebytes). But guess what? The Office program initializations are back to 5 - 10 seconds which was the performance prior to the Version 1709 update of Windows 10 Pro. Somehow stopping (Quit in Malwarebytes terminology) and restarting Malwarebytes (by doing a computer restart) seems to have fixed my 30 to 60 second Office program initialization issues. Guess I will have to ask god why this fixed the Office Pro 2016 program load/initialization problems. Checked this solution on my two other machines and it works on them also - the Office programs are back to their pre-1709 update initialization times. I will ask Mr. Gates for forgiveness on this second Sunday in Lent.

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Anonymous

2018-02-25T18:58:02+00:00

That was my observed performance prior to Build 1709 but now Office products take 30 to 60 seconds to load. One thing I've failed to mention is that starting programs like Word 2016 in the safe mode (CTRL + click on the docx to open) takes 5 seconds. This is suppose to tell you that add-ins are the problem but I've removed all of the add-ins and see no difference in Word initialization time. The only ones I run are Acrobat PDF Maker and PKWARE SecureZip.
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Anonymous

2018-02-25T18:23:25+00:00

Villadest,

Overall I would agree with you except for one fact, I can easily reimage my disk to its Version 1703 state (pre-Fall Creators Update) and all of the Office painful initializations go away. With 1709, I have no problems with anything other than Office Pro 2016 program initialization times - no performance issues. Waiting 60 seconds for Word to start drives me up the wall so I am attempting to minimize the program rather than reload it every time I need to use it. Thirty years of hitting the upper right hand X is difficult to break. I have yet to go down the non-outside products path so I continue to run Norton Security, Malwarebytes Pro and have my own hardware firewall. But this environment was the same under pre-1709 days and has been my nominal operational environment for many years. Norton would be my first guess but again it wasn't a problem prior to 1709. Since Microsoft mucked up the virus program API in Build 1709 and have yet to fix it as best I know, Norton could easily be the problem. I have the same problem on my two other machines, an HP all-on-one and a MS Surface Pro 3 but all machines run under the same operational environment. I've twice done a Windows 10 re-install (ISO) but this isn't a clean install and trying to keep 1709 from updating results in other problems so I gave up on attempting to stay in the 1703 environment. It would take me 3-4 days of effort to do a clean install with all of the amateur radio interfaces I run off of my main desktop. I'll do a clean install when I buy a new computer. I as others, just wish Microsoft would stop trying to force down new features that I'll never use when they severely impact my computer's performance. OneDrive is one example since I use my own NAS to keep my tablet and desktop synced as necessary. I so didn't want it, nor will I likely use the OneDrive feature. For security purposes, I am never likely to use my smartphone in lieu of my desktop (old school). At least programs like Quicken allow you to opt out of the smartphone feature. I just seem to be wasting my life with updates and new features none of which I sought. Computers were suppose to make my life easier but between this lie and the hackers in the world who spoiled the network interfaces, that dream died long ago. I am still looking for a magic bullet and if the past is any indication, Microsoft will eventually fix the issue in the forthcoming updates.
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