The report template I created for our Company has about 70+ OLE links, which I think is the root cause of the issue here.

The template was created in Office 2007, saved as a dotm file, and new word reports are saved as a docx files.

Now, after creating and saving a new report docx file in Office 2013 from the same template, the file can take up to 5 minutes to open.

However, If save the report file in the older .doc 97-2003 format, the file will open immediately with no lag. And even taking the same doc file and resaving from to docx results in the long lag in opening?

All I can think is that it the OLE links are doing something. I may need to remove them all and recreate them using Office/Word 2013 and see what happens.

I also noted that the initially save/conversion from a doc to docx file reduces my file size down tremendously from 1,861kb down to 402kb.