MS Word opens slowly

Statistically, and based on hundreds of posts here, the slow mechanical hard drives Apple installs in21.5 inch iMacs is, as the wise KiltedTim says, the likely cause of your problem. MS Office apps are slower to open even on a fast solid-state drive, so they can feel downright glacial on a mech drive.

However, it is always prudent to eliminate possible software issues first. Sometimes removing useless utilities like anti-virus and so-called "cleaning" apps can help drive performance. To that end, a good place to start looking for culprits is with a snapshot of your software configuration. Fortunately there is a safe, secure way to do that. 

We can quickly and within the confines of these forums help you determine if software issues are the problem if you use EtreCheck, available free from the Mac App Store here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etrecheck/id1423715984?mt=12

We can also see hard data about your drive performance and RAM usage. Etrecheck is the development of a long-serving and trusted contributor here expressly for displaying information in these forums to help us help you. It will not reveal any personal or secure information.

Run it, select “Report" from the left-hand pane (scroll down to the bottom of that pane to find):

When its report displays, click the "Share Report" icon from EtreCheck’s toolbar and then "Copy report” from the resulting dropdown.

⚠️ Please DO NOT highlight the text in the report before using Etrecheck’s “Copy report” command—that will garble the formatting and make the report slower and harder to evaluate.

NOTE: Changes in late 2018 to the forum software require you use the “Additional Text" icon (see example below) to embed the report into a post:

Paste the report into the resulting “Additional Text” window:

Also see this excellent user tip on posting text reports like EtreCheck. It is better illustrated than mine.

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000211

consul_cc Said:

“MS Word opens slowly: I have a MacBook and an iMac both with 8GB of SSD RAM and both running OS 10.16.6.”

———-

Contact Microsoft Support:

They are the developer’s of the software.

Start Here:

Microsoft Contact Us Virtual Agent - Microsoft Support

View and Ask in the MS Forums:

https://answers.microsoft.com/

Use this Google Search Queue:

mojave ms office loading slow site:answers.microsoft.com

Try turning off Carbonite and OneDrive. Backup scheme have to "phone home" a lot and can slow things badly. The slower your internet connection the worse this gets. I use Dropbox and have never had a slowdown, but I have a 100MBps cable connection and only back up files with which I am active working that I may need to access from my MacBook Pro while away from my home office. I rely on two independent external drives for full backups

Do not try to back up your entire hard drive to "the cloud." That will clog even a fast connection.

You have the slow 3GPps. 5400rpm mechanical hard drives that is afflicting so many iMac owners. The drive's performance scores at roughly 75MB/s are about as good and you can get with it. The sad thing is that older entry-level iMacs can be actually faster. Our 2011 21.5-inch iMac scores in the 100-110MBps speeds wit tis entry-level mech drive. That is about 40 percent faster.

Consider making an external SSD your boot drive. It must be USB3 and contain an SSD rated at SATA III 6GBps speed. You use software to clone your internal drive to the external, then use System Preferences > Startup Disk to set the external as the startup drive. Read/write speeds with that combo will jump to about 400B/sec. The internal drive stays active as storage for things that do not need fast access.

Might help a bit or not, but only a hindrance, delete this file & restart...

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.MyCouponsmart.agent.plist

Just a wild guess, but I'll lay odds your MacBook has an SSD and the iMac has a mechanical hard drive.

That's probably the biggest issue with slow load times.

Great news, take care! :)