Microsoft Office 2007 Applications Open Slowly
Mon, Jun 22, 2009A while back I had a user call complaining about Outlook 2007 taking forever to open. While this is a pretty common thing for a customer to call about, after offering remote assistance via ShowMyPC and fully prepping my Placebo Cannon, I found that her XP-based laptop was running totally fine… with the exception of all of her Microsoft Office 2007 applications.
I trimmed down her running processes, did a quick bit of very basic OS optimization/maintenance, and rebooted. The symptoms persisted. When opening any file type which was associated with MS Office 2007, it would take at least 5-10 minutes to open the file. I’d eliminated that she was opening the documents from a network store, such as Microsoft SharePoint, or a file share on a server somewhere. These files were stored locally on her hard drive in various locations.
Nothing worse than trying to Google something which “opens slowly”. Googling anything that has no error message/code is never one of my most treasured pasttimes.
Well eventually I stumbled upon an article on:
http://myitkb.net/4026/microsoft-word-file-or-microsoft-excel-file-takes-a-long-time-to-open.html
Solution
- Go to your Control Panel, (click on Start then Click on Control Panel)
- Click on Folder Options, then File Types
- scroll down to and select (DOC for Word files) or XLS (for Excel files),
- click Advanced and select Open entry,
- click the edit Button.
- deselect “Use DDE”
- append “%1″ (include the quote marks) to the end of the application command line,
- Remove /dde if it is at the end of the command line
- Then click on OK three times.
After making this change, the file types the user was attempting to open launched in a matter of several seconds as opposed to several minutes.
