This is purely for discussion as I know I'm not ready to tackle this in my project, but wanted to perhaps start some conversation on it.



Currently, it is my understanding that in Word 2010 and 2013 that when you open a file in Word that has OLE links to Excel or another application that Word will open and close Excel for each OLE link it finds. And when you have a file with several 100 OLE links, the opening of that Word file can take a VERY long time.

Now, for some reason that was not the case with Word 2007. And I learned that if you save the file in the older 2003 doc format, the Word file will open quickly. I also learned that in Word 2013, you can 'speed' things up if you 1) open the excel file first, 2) open word, and 3) then open the docx file from within word. But unless a user knows to do that, there stuck waiting a long time for a document to open.

And what further stinks is that since i'm forced to downgrade to the older doc format, I lose the ability of the new word features like building blocks.

So.... my question/discussion, Is it possible to intercept the checking of an OLE link when Word opens the file? And if so, can you then intercept it and open that Excel file using adodb instead? I assume this would all be done in an add-in placed in the word start-up folder?

See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970154. The registry fix there may or may not work for later Office versions as well. To try it with Office 2013, use:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\W ord\Options
instead of:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\W ord\Options

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Macropod.

I gave that a shot, and it does appear to fix the problem. Or at least Word opens a lot faster when excel is closed and the user uses WinExplorer to navigate and open a file.

I'm going to speak my IT group about pushing that out to all machines via GPO.