I came across this issue today and thought at first that it may have been a network issue. But opening an Excel or Word file from the hard drive gave me the same slow response.

If your issue is that Excel 2003 or 2007, and or Word 2003 or 2007 is slow at opening an existing file. I found the answer online.

Here it is:

1. Open Windows Explorer (explorer.exe)
2. Select Tools | Folder Options from the menu
3. Go to the File Types tab
4. Select list item XLS (Microsoft Office Excel 97-2003 Worksheet) and click on Advanced.
5. If the “Application used to perform action:” field the default value should be “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE” /e”. Change this to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″. Remember to enclose the full excel.exe path and %1 in parenthesis. Since Windows 95 this is a way to escape spaces in file names; %1 will return the file name of that file that is being opened by double-clicking.You can uncheck “Use DDE” but Microsoft Office Excel 2007 will bring it back to what you see above when you next open it.
6. Just confirm (hit “OK”) on all the Microsoft Windows Explorer dialogs and next time you open a Excel 2003 file in Excel 2007 without having it already running you won’t have to wait! Problem solved!

• Dee Says:
  June 19th, 2008 at 10:14 am

  Fantastic, I’ve been looking for a fix, and this did it!

• Monchster Says:
  June 20th, 2008 at 10:22 am

  Awesome…. I’m glad that you were able to get it to work Dee. Simple fix isn’t it? But it caused me such a headache to find a solution. Gotta love Goggle!