Microsoft Office Performance

 

Over time or after installing new programs, you may notice that an Office product has become slower. It is also possible that an Office product behaves strangely, e.g. in Word an hourglass appears after every typed letter.

 

Why is that?

 

As already covered in my blog, there are Addin, Common Addins,  VBA macros around the Functionality of an Office product or a document to expand / automate.

 

Now let's imagine that all these extensions in the Office product use the same objects and events.

 

This results, for example, in a Change Event when typing a text All who want to react to changes are notified, so that All one after the other or sometimes even overlapping.

 

Possible results:

 

A sand clock appears after every input or it takes forever until something "happens" again.

In the worst case, the Office product simply crashes and the document you were editing is either completely gone (not saved) or at least broken.

 

Solution approaches:

 

- Deactivate addins and common addins one after the other

- Check the size of the templates (from which all new documents are created) of the Office product (ideally less than 1 MB):

 

%userprofile%AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplatesNormal.dot

 

- if the size of the templates has exploded due to autotexts in Word or macros as well as the in-house automatisms of the respective Office product, you can simply rename these template files for testing purposes so that a new lightweight template file is created the next time the program is started

- the size and state of the template file can also lead to crashes and malfunctions under certain circumstances