Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Why is Excel 2007 so slow to start up from Explorer?

analysis
Jun 27, 20081 min

I just hate waiting around for things to happen, especially on my computers. On my fastest Windows XP desktop(1), Excel 2007 takes a painful 30 seconds to display its contents if I click on a simple .XLSX file in Explorer. I find this inexplicable. I hypothesized that this might be a just-in-time compile pause or a security check, but those probably aren't the cause: if I start Excel without a file, it starts u

I hypothesized that this might be a just-in-time compile pause or a security check, but those probably aren’t the cause: if I start Excel without a file, it starts up in one or two seconds. When I load the same .XLSX file from the Excel recent documents list it displays in under a second.

Any ideas, other than the obvious workaround of loading the worksheet from Excel?

(1) The computer in question is a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 GB of RAM and NVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics. It seemed like a fast box several years ago, when it was new.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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