Speed up Excel 2007 startup
The Problem
If Excel isn't running already, double-clicking a file will start
Excel itself almost immediately, but the clicked file will be loaded
only after about one minute.
The Solution
At least on Windows XP the problem can be solved as described
below.
- Application Explorer
- Menu Tools
- Menu item Folder Options
- Tab File Types
- List item XLS
- Button Advanced
- List item Open
- Button Edit...
In the dialog box that appears you need to make two adjustments:
Application to perform action:At the end of the line after /e append a space
character followed by "%1" (including the quotes)DDE Application Not Running:Insert new text: [rem see command line]
(including the brackets)
Details
We experienced the problem after updating to MS Office 2007. My
father noticed that an Excel sheet gets loaded immediately if you
include the path of EXCEL.EXE in the command line. Loading documents
via DDE, as Explorer does it, seems to take much more time, at least
if the application is not already running. The modifications described
above will pass the file path immediately when the application is
started, the DDE command that gets executed later on is only a remark,
as an empty field would result in passing the default action from two
lines above that field. The /e seems to ensure that Excel
will not open an empty sheet, so I originally dropped that because
usually no empty sheet is opened when a file is specified. However I
got a
report
from someone using /e, and as it didn't cause any harm
for me either, I now suggest to leave it in place. If Excel is
running already, additional documents will be opened via DDE as
before, resulting in only one Excel process running.
Word
Time and again I've been asked whether I knew a similar trick for
Word. Even without any tricks Word starts fairly fast, but even there
adding "%1" gave me a slight increase in startup speed.
I don't exactly know what this [REM _DDE_Direct] is. It
looks like some kind of "special comment", that could have some effect
despite being a comment. I decided to copy that comment to the
DDE
Application Not Running box, and could not detect any ill
effects. I also kept the /n and the /dde on
the command line, simply because I could find no harm in it.
Uninstall
If you try out these suggestions, but they don't work out for you,
reverting to the way it was before might prove more difficult than you
would expect. It seems the dialog where you make your changes will
always append a %1 to the command line when you press OK
and it isn't present already. The only solution I could find was using
regedit to remove the %1 without using the
dialog. The command is stored under the default key at
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\command. If
you choose to revert the DDE settins using regedit as
well, you can simply remove the whole ddeexec\IfExec
subtree.
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