When opening Microsoft Excel 2003 files in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 without having Excel 2007 already running you may find that files that a long time to open (20-60 seconds) while Excel 2007 or even Microsoft Office Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007 files take only a portion of that time to load.
The solution to this problem is easy and does not require any additional software other than the standard Microsoft Windows Explorer.
- Open Windows Explorer (explorer.exe)
- Select Tools | Folder Options from the menu
- Go to the File Types tab.
- Select list item XLS (Microsoft Office Excel 97-2003 Worksheet) and click on Advanced.
If the “Appl ication used to perform action:” field the default value should be “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12EXCEL.EXE” /e” . Change this to “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″ . Remember to enclose the full excel.exe path and %1 in parenthesis. Since Windows 95 this is a way to escape spaces in file names; %1 will return the file name of that file that is being opened by double-clicking.You can uncheck “U se DDE” but Microsoft Office Excel 2007 will bring it back to what you see above when you next open it.
- Just confirm (hit “OK” ) on all the Microsoft Windows Explorer dialogs and next time you open a Excel 2003 file in Excel 2007 without having it already running you won’t have to wait!
- If the above listed steps don’t fix the problem, simply add the Lookup Wizard add-in in Excel. Some readers have reported that solved the problem for them! To install it click the Office Button, Excel Options, Add-Ins, and then click Manage Excel Add-ins | Go on the bottom of the window, select Lookup Wizard and click OK!
This works fine, but say you are opening more than one file at the same time and you have startup macros registered in “PERSONAL.XLS”, then you will get an error message saying that PERSONAL.XLS is already open.
It does work as advised. However now when you try to open Excel 2007 files with extension .xlsx it takes long as it used to for the 2003 files.
To Husmukh
Make the same /e->”%1″ change for *.xlsm, *.xlsx
Thanks for the advice. It works.
Greetings;
I tried this method to fix the 1 minute startup time for Excel (after I upgraded to Office 2007) – It seemed to work for a while and then the problem is back.
What I did is:
I have removed the file PDFMaker.xla from:
C:\ProgramFiles\MicrosoftOffice\Office12\XLSTART
and this fixes the problem.
My logic to why I did this is that Power Point and Word do not have any add-ins and the startup time is fine.
Excel had the PDFMaker add-in ….. So get rid of it.
Can someone tell me where to find file types in VISTA!!!!
AHAHAHAHHHHHHHH
Hayley: This article may be of help – http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article02-500
I have applied this for .xls, .xlsm and .xlsx. It works great! Except…
Now, after opening the spreadsheet, when I close it I get an error message saying the file can not be found. Any ideas?
Anybody?
Does the message popup after you close the file or does it maybe show up in the background and you don’t notice it until Excel is close. I’ve seen that message many times, but it usually pops up when opening the program, not closing.
I have the same issue that brenna posted. The message comes AFTER you close the Excel. (if you close the sheet, no error – only happens when Excel is exited.)
Hi! I looked around for it a couple of times, and can’t find it anywhere until after I close Excel.
Same problem, “windows cannot find \\server\share\filename.xls”
otherwise, the fix works fine…
Leave the trailing “/e” as is, and append “%1″, so it reads
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE†/e “%1″
This fixed the closing error for me.
Thanks Brian,
I updated the post with the proper parameters.
How funny, this does not work for me! I am applying these changes for .xls, .xlsm, and .xlsx. I even played around with the spacing around the /e. No luck. Well, I guess the error is still much better than the original problem.
Thanks!
How in the world do you this in Vista? I’ve checked and there doesn’t seem to be a way to actually get to the point to add the /e %1.
Wilson – check this article out: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article02-500
VISTA NOTE:
After d/l the creative elemnts app, it best to leave the DDE box checked when editing the command for opening excel files. Add “%1″ to the box beneath the c:|… command line.
Lower box should read
/e “%1″ and the DDE stays checked.
I’ve made these changes and it fixed the slowness issue but now when a spreadsheet is opened I get a message saying that the file is already opened and reopening will cause any changes to be discarded. Anyone else having this problem?
Yup. But no idea how to fix it.
I’m getting the same problem, but it’s only when I’m launching excel for the first time. If I leave excel open and open a document I don’t get the “document already open message”. I guess it’s the lesser of evils.
The fix works for me, and I get the error after closing Excel but… ONLY if I close without any changes being made to the file AND within the 30 seconds that it used to take to open in the first place. If I leave the file open for longer or get prompted to save changes there’s no error.
Thank you for posting this fix — it worked for me!
Have a great day,
tim@pickl.com
I see that some people are haveing problems when closing saying the file isn’t found, When I OPEN a file is says its not found, and i click “ok” and the file opens anyhow. Did I miss somthing or edit the wrong opening action? Thanks for any help anyone may provide
OK! I fixed the “connot find problem” I don’t know how but i did. The prob;em I have now is that when the file opens, it tries to open itself again, then promption the “if you reopen the file you lose unsaved blahblah”. Please help! Thanks
The article says that you CAN uncheck the Use DDE option. If you do not uncheck, then it opens the document twice. By unchecking the Use DDE option it clears the DDE Message field and the document only opens once.
I’m having the same problem with my Excel 2007. Here’s what I noticed – When I double click on the file Excel opens but the file doesn’t. The program has “Ready” at the bottom of the window and I would wait several minutes without any files opening. Now what I do is double-click on the file icon and when Excel opens I immediately minimize the window and it pops back up automatically with the file opened. Not sure why this works, but it does.
Thank you Mr. Wizard. You’re my hero! Fixed the lag when opening Excel.
These are the registry changes if you want to write it into a simple
batch/reg file – one for .xls and one for .xlsx:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\command]
@=”\”C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE\” /e
\”%1\”"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\command]
@=”\”C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE\” /e \”1%
\”"
Handy if you have a big network that you want to deploy it across lots of PCs through a login script.
CORRECTED:
These are the registry changes if you want to write it into a simple
batch/reg file – one for .xls and one for .xlsx:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\command]
@=â€\â€C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE\†/e
\â€%1\—
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\command]
@=â€\â€C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE\†/e \â€%1
\—
Handy if you have a big network that you want to deploy it across lots of PCs through a login script.
Great walkthrough, ty for the fix to an annoying issue.
Hi Thanks for the help. You solved the problem. One problem I have is that when the windows updates come out for office the problem comes back again. I send the fix and then works. Do you know why the problem keeps coming back? I don’t even have adobe installed on the computer anymore.
I had a single user experiencing issues opening Excel spreadsheets as described above. Logging into the machine as another using showed that the problem was within her profile.
Turned out an add-in for an old version of Sage was the cause of her problem. Disbling the add-in resolved everything.
So may be worth a look at add-ins before taking the dive and trying the above fix.
i’m glad i found this help group, but can’t find a solution to my particular problem.
running XP (i hate vista), and installed both Excel 2003 and 2007 (some of my clients use 2007 so i’m stuck with it).
i usually open files in Win Explorer by clicking on them. thanks to this help group, XLSX opens with 2007 and XLS opens with 2003.
but Excel2003 opens each file in a separate window/instance. i want it to open the various XLS within a single instance, so i can readily tile (view multiple XLS at one time) and easily copy data back/forth. have fruitlessly looked for a start-up switch to force excel to open XLS within same instance/window.
any ideas, folks?
thanks!
Hello,
I recently had a very similar problem, and the solution suggested immediately worked perfectly. But the problem that was odd is, i did this for .csv files also, and what i ended up doing was putting Open& in the Action area, which stopped it from trying to open the file twice!
Thanks again for the advice.
No luck for me adding the %1 in the file type. I still get multiple occurances of Excel 2007 opening.
I have to share my vista-created word and excel files with Mac OS users. Unless I convert to pdf before sending, my doc looks different than it did on my screen and print preview. how do i make sure what i’m looking at is what i’m sending to the mac users?
Frustrated – what fonts are you using and where specifically are you having problems? Are the problems related to the layout, fonts or images / charts? Just for the record, whether you are using Vista, XP or 2000 does not make a difference. Microsoft Office products the same results on these systems. Each OS “family” will present differently, though. For example: if you view a page on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, you will have three different looks.
Have the same issue with word. Opening 2003 word files are extremely slow with word 2007. Tried the same little trick as with Excel but still slowwwww. Any Ideas?
If you are getting strange errors after applying this fix you may be entering the wrong type of quotation marks. If you copy the text string from this article you will get web-formated quotation marks. You can tell because they are at an angle, rather than straight up and down. Try typing the quotes manually to avoid this problem. This fixed my “cannot find file” errors.
I added the “%1″ and the opening speed has improved – thanks!. Now I get the same problem as Betty – Excel2003 opens each file in a separate window/instance which I don’t want. How do I get it to open only 1 instance of Excel?
Our IT department found and implemented this fix some time ago. However, every time Excel is updated (running Office Repair to fix an Outlook problem, installing a security update, etc.) the original values get plugged into these registry entries, and I have to go fix it all over again! Maybe somebody should send this fix to MS so they can stop re-breaking it with every update. Aaaargh.
So I don’t really think this is the right place for this question, but I am desperate! I have a somewhat related problem to the one noted – I have a workbook that was created in Excel 2003. Part of my company has upgraded to 2007 (from everything I have heard/read, I am holding off as long as possible!) Those folks are having a terrible time using the file. Simple tasks like clicking on a autofilter to filter the 1900 ish rows, or hiding or deleting columns locks up the file or takes minutes to complete. Does anyone have a clue what could be going on here?
Jenn – does it matter what format you have the file in? What I’m trying to find out is if the file in Excel 2003 format behaves any differently than when it is converted to Excel 2007.
We found that the %1 workaround created the “second opening” issue, too.
However, we found our core issue on slow opening was due to an XLS version file within the XLSTART directory. Once that XLS (hidden macro file like PERSONAL.XLS) was saved in the new XLSB version instead, the slow opening issue was resolved.
Thanks! The DDE was the trick for me, this has been driving me crazy.
I LOVE the artwork on your sie!
Wow, took me all day to get this to work but finally figured out I wasn’t including the space in the /e_”%1″. Well worth the trouble though!
Hi , i have some questions about you desing
maybe you can give designer contacts?
Great site, being a MCSE myself, a great precent of your post work great