Office apps incredibly slow to start on Mac - Big Sur 11.2.3 - Please help!

[Nicola-J]

Apologies if I'm in the wrong thread, I'm not sure where to post.

My Office apps for Mac (especially Word and Outlook) take a very long time to open – sometimes it can take more than 10 minutes to open Outlook!

This is only the case after having shut down the Mac. If I quit the Office app and then immediately start the app again, starting will only take a couple of seconds.

I'm signed into to two 365 accounts - my main account is my personal, but I'm also signed in with my work account for OneDrive, Teams and Outlook. It must be something to do with the sign in. My mac is high spec and everything else runs great, even resource intensive programs such as Adobe run fast. It's sooooo annoying and I often just leave the mac running without shutting down.

I've completely removed Microsoft apps and re-installed loads of times. It's usually runs a little quicker after doing this, but over time, starting Microsoft apps becomes progressively slower so I need remove and re-install again.

I’m running the latest version of Office and my Mac is running Big Sur 11.2.3. My Mac is just over a year old - 3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB ram. Any advice would be hugely appreciated

 

[rehkram]

My immediate question would be have you contacted Microsoft support? If it's related to your MS accounts setup they can surely debug it from their end.

Also you might want to consider updating Big Sur to the latest release, 11.5.2, since a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 11.2.3

 

[Nicola-J]

Thanks for your reply. I've now updated to 11.5.2. I have contacted Microsoft support but they aren't the most helpful to be honest. Somebody on the Microsoft forum said it was because I din't have an SSD drive, but I have a 1TB Fusion drive. The iMac doesn't run super fast in general - it averages around 50 seconds to get past the apple logo to enter my password, and then it averages 1 minute 20 seconds to load my desktop. Apple mail is a little slow to start, but once started it's fine, Google is the same. This isn't too much of a pain - it's Microsoft apps that are causing the most issues by far.

The only items set to open on login are OneDrive and Adobe Acrobat Synchronizer. Do you think it's a problem with the iMac itself? I'm out of warranty now so I'm not sure what I can do?

 

[Boyd01]

80 seconds to load the desktop after logging in is really slow. I have a 2018 Mini with the same processor as your iMac and it only takes a few seconds for that to happen with a SSD. But I wonder if this has something to do with syncronizing your files on OneDrive? I have Office 365 and Word opens in a few seconds. I don't really use OneDrive for anything, although there are a couple small Word files stored there.

How fast is your internet connection? I have fast FIOS 400/400. That might be a factor when it is verifying/updating the Office apps at startup and loading files from the cloud. I don't use Outlook.

It's a shame to have such a nice computer with the bottleneck of a mechanical hard drive. It used to be easy to just clone the internal drive to an external SSD and boot from that, however that has gotten more complicated with the newer Macs and operating systems. Should still be possible, but I have not done it myself. You could get something like a Samsung T7 SSD which is very fast, I have several of them but don't use them to boot my Mac.

 

[Nicola-J]

Thanks for your reply. My internet connection isn't great - we don't have fast broadband where we live so we are using a 4G home router. Speeds aren't bad, they average around 30mg download, sometimes a lot faster. When I use my work laptop from home, Office apps/OneDrive load straight away. So even though my connection isn't great, I don't think that's the problem.

I paid to upgrade the spec of my iMac just over a year ago and I thought it would last me many years to come. The spec should be more than ample for my needs. I would cry if I had to buy a new SSD! I don't understand much about hard drives, is mine not up to scratch?

Do you know if there are any tests I can do to identify the problem? Thank you!!!!

 

[Boyd01]

The startup times you listed sound really slow, but it's been a long time since I used a mac with a hard drive. The iMacs with Fusion Drives get very little love around here .

You could try the Blackmagic disk test and see what your results are. My internal SSD gets about 2700 MB/sec and my external Samsung T7 SSD's are about 900 MB/sec. A 5400 RPM hard drive in good condition is only about 100 MB/sec. Not sure about fusion drives, they might not give very accurate results due to their nature.

 

[Nicola-J]

Thanks for your reply. I've just done the Blackmagic disk test - the first result was 850 write and 1200 read. It continued to test and the next result (and those thereafter) averaged 30-50 for both. I'm not really sure what this means or why there was such a huge drop?

In terms of the slow Microsoft apps - Microsoft support basically said to open in safe mode, if the problem persists then it's just a slow mac and there's nothing more I can do. I booted in safe mode (Onedrive didn't start). I opened Outlook - it look over a minute to open and then once opened, it was stuck on 'determining changes' and 'pending sync' for 3 minutes 20 seconds. (This has been the problem all along with Outlook). Word took 1 minute 10 seconds to open in safe mode. This is quicker than normal, but still way slow.

The spec is: iMac 21.5" - 3.2 GHz, 6-Core, Intel Core i7. 16 GB ram - 1TB Fusion drive (32GB SSD) - Graphics - Radeon Pro 560xX W/ 4gb GDDR5.

It was around £1.8k a year and a bit ago. I honestly thought the spec was good

 

[Boyd01]

That's what I meant about the Blackmagic test on fusion drives. A fusion drive actually has two components - a slow, 5400 RPM hard disk and a fast 128gb SSD. Using software, operations that frequently use small amounts of data will read/write from the SSD which speed them up considerably. Then, when the system isn't so busy, that data from the SSD is copied to the hard disk. But file access that involves a lot of data will just use the hard drive and not the SSD. So, the fast results from the test were just using the SSD, but eventually "the piper had to be paid" and you were at the mercy of the slow hard disk.

The 30 to 50 MB/sec number is quite slow however, like I said, that kind of hard drive runs at about 100MB/sec when new. I am just not that familiar with fusion drives however. This might be typical or it might suggest there's some kind of problem with your hard drive. Sorry, I don't really know how to test that without doing something drastic. I have a 2014 Mini with the same 1TB fusion drive. First thing I did was to split the SSD from the hard disk, which can be done with some simple terminal commands. I then installed the system on internal 128gb SSD from the fusion drive and use an external SSD for all my data. You could do something similar, but that is pretty drastic.

The spec on your iMac is fine, like I said, you have the same CPU as my 2018 which I've been really happy with, and I do some demanding things like running virtual machines, using Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. But your problem is the fusion drive. Sorry, but it was a mistake getting that, you should have spent a bit more and gotten a 1tb internal SSD.

Not quite sure what to recommend at this point. Maybe somebody else knows how to test the hard disk without messing up the fusion drive? I suspect that moving everything to a fast external SSD (like the Samsung T7) would fix this. But that assumes there isn't something else funny going on with Office 365. If nothing else, the external SSD would make your Mac much faster all around.

 

[Nicola-J]

Thanks for you reply, I wish I had of known that when I was purchasing!! From memory it came with a 250GB SSD drive as standard, I paid extra for the 1TB fusion drive - they were the only 2 options available.

I wouldn't really want to start splitting the SSD from the hard disk because I don't have a clue what I'm doing.

I do use Adobe Photoshop/InDesign and Premier Pro - they are pretty resource intensive, they don't open instantly but they start up and run much faster than Office apps.

I've also created a test account on my mac - this isn't logged into OneDrive. This account has the same problems opening Word/Outlook (as above they are really slow in safe mode too).

I'm not sure where to go from here?!

 

[rehkram]

Hmmm... sounds like an adobe 'unhelpful "creative cloud" update utility' infestation. I'll try and find some links to give you some more idea of what I'm talking about but to cut a long story short, take a look at Activity Monitor on your Mac after rebooting. Sort alphabetically by process name.

If it's what I think it is you need to get rid of adobe's rubbish "creative cloud" utility background processes. The primary adobe apps will still run fine, actually better, without them.

Been there, done that; I use Illustrator for my business. Will report back when I remember all the steps I took to get rid of all the useless CC cr@pware that used to run in the background on my main Mac.

 

[TriciaMacMillan]

Not sure if you're having the same issue, but when I had the problem with extremely sluggish MS Office apps (practically unusable), it turned out that the license was defect for some reason. I removed the license following the instructions at How to remove Office license files on a Mac, then re-applied the license, and after that, all sluggishness was gone, and Office worked as expected.