Very Slow Document Opening with Excel Links

Kelly has a Word document that links to about 30 graphs in an Excel workbook. On opening, Word tries to download the workbook over and over even though all the links are set to manually update. Kelly wonders if there is a way she can stop this from happening, as it can take over 10 minutes to open the Word document.

If the remote workbook is actually being downloaded, you might want to try these steps to see if it helps:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word. In Word 2010 or a later version display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options Options.)
2. Click Advanced at the left side of the dialog box.
3. Scroll through the available options until you get to the Save section. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Cut, Copy, and Paste section of the Word Options dialog box.

4. Clear the Copy Remotely Stored Files onto Your Computer check box.
5. Click OK.

If that check box (step 4) was not selected to begin with, then Word isn't really downloading the files to your system. Instead, it is opening them to retrieve information. You should be able to speed up this process by simply opening the Excel workbook before you open the Word document. Since the workbook is already open, the information linked to in the Word document is more immediately available and can be updated faster.

As a side-note to this approach, if the Excel workbook takes a long time to open, then the problem may not be with Word, but with how the Excel workbook is put together. Or, it could be that the network connection over which you need to open the workbook is quite slow. (These are all issues that are not, obviously, addressed in this tip, but which can affect opening the document that relies on the slow Excel workbook.)

There are also a couple of other things you might check. First, make sure that your Excel workbook is using a more modern file format. This comes into play if your Word document is in, say DOCX format and your Excel workbook is in the old XLS format (used in Excel 2003 and earlier). Since it is in an older format, then Word must load additional file drivers to access the older file format, a process that can slow down updating.

The other thing you might check is the way the actual link was created between Word and Excel. When you paste objects (such as an object from Excel) into the Word document, you have the option of choosing "Paste Link." This means that the pasted object will be updated if the source workbook changes. If you don't absolutely need that connection, paste a new copy of the object using a method other than "Paste Link" and you will be able to open your Word document must faster.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7356) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.