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

2016-01-24T22:47:28+00:00

I've tried everything and have spent hours searching every forum I could find. Nothing seems to speed it up. I thought it might be trying to connect with the OneDrive, but that's not it. It's not the anti-virus program.

If Microsoft reads any of this, they would know that the Community is not pleased.

Hey Microsoft - remember us? We're your customers and we pay real $$ for your stuff. How about making something worth paying for. I run Open Office on a different Mac and it is just fine.

I'm going to keep looking for solutions. But one thing I've noticed is NONE of the professional reviewers of the Office 2016 release mentioned anything about it being slower than molasses to startup. I guess you pay them well.

Thanks for letting me vent. If I find a solution, I'll return to post it.

(MacBook Pro - Mid-2012 - 8Gig - El Capitan 10.11.3)
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Anonymous

2016-02-06T21:37:58+00:00
Sam24sk probably has the best advice in just not going to Office 2016. Office 2011 is true OS X software and efficient. The one exception might be Outlook 2016 which actually does provide needed feature AND performance improvements. (Yes Office 2016 is also "pretty")

For those who would like to de-bloat Office 2016, I provide the following steps. Note - I don't use Office 2016 in a "power" sense so I'm willing to delete ALL unneeded fonts and language resources. You will have to make your determination of the extent of how much you want to remove/de-bloat. Also Microsoft so-called updates will put all the "fat" right back in so most of you will not be as tenacious at "exercising" his right to be free of it.

Steps to thin out the bloat in each application of the Office 2016 for Mac:
1. Open the Applications folder
2. Right click (Control-click) on one of the Office applications (i.e Microsoft Word), select Show Package Contents.
3. Opens Contents and than Resources. Click on the Kind column heading. This will sort folders together. List view is recommended.
4. For Word, Excel and Powerpoint - I delete ALL the fonts in the DFonts folder. For Outlook and Notes, I let this be because Outlook did render strangely. Also there are fewer fonts to delete. There is a Fonts folder. Leave it alone.
5. Open DFonts, type Control-A to select all and press Command-D. Enter the Mac password to delete.
6. Back in the Resources folder, I delete all the language folders ending in .lproj except the en.lprog. If you actually need more than one language, leave the ones you use. The abbreviations in most cases clearly indicate the language.
7. Back up in Contents, open Shared Resources and then Proofing Tools. Delete unneeded language tools.
8. Repeat for each Office application.
Watch the disk size of each application shrink to less than half its installed size. You WILL see a dramatic improvement in launch speed. In fact launch speed will be comparable to the launch speed of the older Office 2011 applications

Warning: The next Office "upgrade" will waste bandwidth, time and disk resources and download all the files and resources you deleted. You will have to repeat after each so-called update which in reality is a complete re-install of each Office application. The above deletion steps might be a nice project for someone to write an application (macro) to de-bloat all the Office 2016 applications after each so-called update. There are third party applications to delete unneeded language resources from applications.

Unfortunately, whether you delete unneeded fonts or not, each Office application Font menu will show the drop down list as if each were still there (even when you delete fonts from the Systems fonts area using Font Book!).

So with Office 2016, you get tons of duplicated fonts, multiplied foreign language resources (lproj, fonts, tools) and a static Font menu. This is all because Microsoft is treating their OS X Office applications like there were iOS - each application is to be independent. Office 2016 is a huge step backwards in load time mostly because of all this bloated duplicate internal resources in EACH application of the suite.
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