Excel 2007 slow opening Excel 2003 Spreadsheets

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:42:30 +0000

We recently came across a problem which we thought we would share with all of you. We recently commissioned a new workstation for a client running Windows XP Pro and Office 2007 Basic. However, after a little time we were contacted by the client to say that it was very slow opening workbooks in Excel. They were able demonstrate the problem, if you open a workbook from a folder without Excel 2007 being open already it would take anywhere upto 2 minutes before the workbook would be displayed. However, if Excel 2007 was open already they would open fine. After doing some tests on it we were able to locate the issue which was due the way in which Windows explorer was configured to open “XLS” files. A simple change resolved the issue and here is what you do to resolve the issue:

First open “My Computer”
The select the “Tools” menu and select “Options”
Now go to the “File Types” tab
Go down the list and select “XLS (Microsoft Office Excel 97-2003 Worksheet)” and then click on “Advanced”. Now select “Open” from the list and click on “Edit”. Now in the box titled “Application used to perform action:” add a “%1″ at the end of the line. Also take the tick out of the box titled “Use DDE”.
Now click on “OK” and select “OK” on all of the subsequent windows and thats it! Excel 2007 will now open Excel 2003 workbooks without any problems.

JPT Solutions » Excel 2007

Excel 2007 slow opening Excel 2003 Spreadsheets