I have 3 users experiencing problems with Excel 2010.  On the first use of the day, when they try to format a range of cells from the right click, format cells context menu, it takes approximately 8-10 seconds for the menu to open.  After the first time of the day, it opens almost immediately.  I have tried opening Excel in safe mode with no change in behavior.  I have also changed the default printer to the XPS document writer to rule out a driver issue.  The issue isn't specific to one OS either.  One is Win XPSP3, one is Win 7 Enterprise x32 and one is Win 7 Enterprise x64.  The problem is there with all machines.  I can create the problem by rebooting the machine and starting Excel again.  I have watched task manager to ensure that there were adequate hardware resources during this time and there is.  CPU is at about 10-15% usage and over 1G of physical RAM available.  All machines have SP1 installed.

• Moved by Max MengMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Friday, January 27, 2012 1:30 AM Moving to a more appropriate forum (From:Office IT Pro General Discussions)

BBellASFCU wrote:

I have a case open with Microsoft on this at the moment.  We have done a number of things and what seemed to help most was doing a repair of Office.  I'm not saying that this is the fix, but it seemed to have the most impact on improved performance.

Not to dampen your optimism, but I just did an Office 2010 repair, and it did not improve the misbehavior.

Since the misbehavior is intermittent (for me, at least), I am not surprised that you might have come to the wrong conclusion.  That is, it might have been just coincidence that you did not see the problem after doing the Office repair; perhaps even now.

I did confirm that there is no network traffic during the misbehavior.  I used a network packet tracer to determine that.

I suspect the problem might be in the Registry.  Perhaps the lookup time is short when something is cached in memory due to a prior operation; otherwise, the long lookup is due to a messy Registry.  I'm certainly guilty of not cleaning it up.

But that is a wild guess based on no real knowledge at all.

• Edited by joeu2004 Monday, February 20, 2012 11:37 PM

Hi Ed, thank you very much for your "wild guess", in my case definitely this was the problem. It appeared exactly the same time I moved my print server from home so my default printer didn't exist anymore and solved it with setting an existing printer as default ( in my case a PDF printer ). All the best, Zoli

• Edited by Zoli Vajda Saturday, April 20, 2013 7:33 AM

Format dialog box is slow only the first time when opening Excel. If I close Excel and open it the second time, the format dialog box is no longer slow. I have to reboot in order to make it slow.

One thing that makes the initial opening of the format dialog faster is opening the Fonts folder at startup.

Changing the default printer didn't help me.

• Edited by Alex844 Saturday, June 29, 2013 12:08 AM bad format of superscript
• Proposed as answer by Charlies36 Tuesday, July 02, 2013 5:37 PM

Not to sound fatalistic or anything, but I have never NOT seen this behavior.  I have put up with it for years, both in Office 2010 and 2013.  Not sure if it was exhibited in Office 2003 or 2007 or not.  I have simply taught myself that if the Format Cells dialog doesn't pop up immediately, then it's time for me to get another cup of coffee.  There are so many other more annoying quirks with Windows/Office that counting to 10 while I wait for the dialog to pop up the 1st time each day seems almost quaint.  Also, a Zen outlook helps.  ;-)