Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Teams) are very slow to launch

[martim16]

Hello there!
I hope I'm writing on the right topic 😅

Since I bought my iMac 2017 21.5'' in 2020, I noticed that Office apps (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams) were taking ages to launch! At first I thought it was a bug and would soon be fixed with a Microsoft update. It turned out that everything stayed the same, and the situation only got worse when I updated my iMac to macOS Big Sur, and later to macOS Monterey.
One thing to note, is that not only did I experience this in Office apps, but also in other apps that were not native to Apple (like Chrome, Notion...)

In August of this year, I was searching online for solutions to this problem of apps taking a long time to open and I found out that swapping my Mac's internal HDD for an SSD would be the best! I even saw reviews on the internet and was actually quite surprised! So I went to an Apple certified store, and paid to have an SSD swapped out for me. I even asked for a 1TB SSD, and for no data migration, so that I could start using my Mac as if it were new. When I plugged it in at home, it obviously came with the latest version of macOS Monterey, but as soon as I started using it I could tell it wasn't that fast. The startup time was really fast and other things too, but opening applications was still slow. I read again online, and they recommended on several sites that I should downgrade to the macOS that came installed when I bought it the first time. And that's what I did and downgraded to macOS Catalina. To my surprise, Chrome and other apps actually performed better than on the Monterey! However, the Office apps were still slow to open (13-15 seconds to open!)

Do you have any suggestions?

(sorry for the long text but I felt it would be better to tell the whole story 😅)

My iMac specs:
- iMac (21.5-inch, 2017)
- Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
- RAM: 8GB2133 MHz DDR4
- Chip: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB
- Disk: 1 TB SSD (SATA) With 953.6 GB free!
- Version: macOS Catalina - 10.15.7

 

[NoBoMac]

Stop using Office?

All joking aside, Office is a resource hog (Word is listed as 1.2GB in size).

Apple's Pages takes about 8 seconds. LibreOffice around same (and <800MB in size). 13-15 seconds in nothing: can remember pre-SSD days Office taking 45-50 seconds to open.

 

[arw]

Except for the boot time it doesn't sound like an SSD (Fusion Drive at best).
- Assuming they didn't install an NVME SSD, can you check the model of the SSD in "About this Mac > System Profiler > Hardware > SATA"?
I'm asking because even on my 2013 Mac Pro it takes 4-5 seconds after a fresh reboot to open Word. Excel and PowerPoint in less than 4. If they have been opened once, then they start in ~2 seconds.
Maybe it's a Gatekeeper issue (although unlikely as you did a fresh install):
- Try opening "Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor" and sort by "% CPU". Then open an Office app and watch the first entry in Activity Monitor

(BTW, I'm using Big Sur and Office 16.62)

 

[martim16]

THANK YOU VERY MUCH! You guys helped me a lot and I was able to solve the Office apps problem!
I opened the activity monitor, and opened Word. While Word was opening, a process (that I really can't remember the name of) appeared in the activity monitor, and I finished it! Word opened in the meantime, and I went to try to see if finishing that process worked. I opened Excel, and it was almost instantaneous (3 little jumps)! I couldn't believe it, so much so that I restarted to see if it hadn't been the cache doing that. But no! I restarted and opened all the Office apps, and pretty fast! Thank you very, very, very much!

The remaining "problem" is Chrome (which takes 2-4 seconds to open) but, although it bothers me a bit, I think I can work...

Do you have any other solution for Chrome (of taking a little while to open)?

Thanks!