Open Microsoft Word 2007 Faster as Notepad

Disable the "Update automatic links on Open" option
When you disable the Update automatic links on Open option, documents may open faster. You can manually update links later.

To disable the Update automatic links on Open option, follow these steps:
1. Start Word 2007.
2. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.
3. In the Word Options dialog box, click Advanced, and then scroll down to the General section.
4. Click to clear the Update automatic links on Open check box, and then click OK.

To manually update links, follow these steps:
1. Start Word 2007.
2. Click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Finish, and then click Edit Links to Files.
3. Click the link that you want to update, and then click Update Now.

Even when the automatic updating is turned off, Word still seems to "examine" each link and attempts to open linked Excel files. I know this is happening because I opened an S:\folderA\source.xlsm first and then I opened a Word doc that has a link to S:\folderB\source.xlsm. I got an error message about trying to open two files with the same name. If Word were not updating or "examining" the links, it wouldn't even need to open source.xlsm.

“Examining” each link, even if it is correct and working, significantly slows down the opening of the document. If the links are incorrect, the open gets stuck waiting for OLE responses to open a different file. Sometimes the open hangs completely. We cannot even open the file to correct the links.

A Microsoft engineer confirmed that this is a known problem with NO KNOWN solution with the XML file formats. He recommended that we save all our documents in the binary (.doc, .xls) formats because our documents have so many links between Word and Excel.

If you want to demonstrate this problem to yourself, simply open Task Manager or Windows Explorer. Make sure that Excel is not running. Open a Word 2007 document (.docx) with links to an Excel file. You will see a process for Excel start in Task Manager and you will see an Excel temp file open in Windows Explorer. This happens even when you have unchecked the "Update Automatic Links at Open."

I suspect this could be the reason for many people experiencing very slow file open times in Word 2007. I am surprised there is not more urgency to fix this KNOWN problem.