I have Office 2013 installed on my Windows 8 (now 8.1) computer. For about three weeks, all programs in the office suite ran perfectly. However, an extremely annoying problem suddenly appeared, which has been plaguing me for the past two weeks: The file menu is EXTREMELY slow consistently across all programs in the Office 2013 suite. There's a very noticeable delay, about 2 or 3 seconds, between when I click the FILE button, and when the file menu actually appears. Similarly, all options within this menu are laggy. Typically, the program will enter an unresponsive state for those few seconds and then promptly recover. I haven't lost any data to this issue yet, but it wastes my time.

I don't have much more than the essentials installed on my computer. Drivers for my motherboard, NVidia graphics card, Office, web browser and about 6 other trusted programs.

Any and all help appreciated. Thanks.

Hi

For your issue, we recommend you start Office in safe mode to check: Hold 'Ctrl' key and click into the program.

If Office safe works, disable the add-ins following steps mentioned below and determine the problem causing add-in:
a) Click on File menu, click Options, Add-ins, Go button besides Manage: Com-in Add.
b) Check if there are add-ins listed, clear the check box.
c) Close the Office program and restart it.
d) Disable each add-in one at a time, restart the Excel/Word, and repeat the above procedure. If the issue reappears again, it will help you to determine which add-in is causing this issue.
For detailed information about Office safe mode, see the article below:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/why-cant-i-start-my-office-2013-application-HA104011864.aspx

If the issue persists, we might do a repair for your Office suites in Control panel>Program and features>Office>Change>Repair

Regards

Tylor Wang
TechNet Community Support

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• Marked as answer by Tony Chen CHN<abbr class="affil" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-family:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;color:#000000;">Microsoft contingent staff, Moderator</abbr>Wednesday, November 06, 2013 3:29 PM" HUH? This problem is STILL plaguing Office 365 users! Get it fixed!

I'm having this issue too. I think the problem appeared after upgrading to Windows 8.1 . Have you found a solution for it? @Tylor Wang This happens in safe mode too so it's not an issue with Add-ins.

Hello,

I have many users on my domain seeing this issue as well. All running Windows 7 32 and 64 bit. Removing add-ins did not work for us and this happens to machines that have extra memory along with a fresh image in some cases.

Any suggestions would be helpful, thank you. 

Same here. Tried word safe mode and problem still persist with laggy File Menu.

same here - Windows 7, Office 2013 - put it in safe mode still the same issue though not quite as bad - I have no addins active.

OK so I had the same problem on my machine. I also had a very old graphics card that gave me a Windows Performance grade of 1 (ie terrible). I changed my graphics card and all of a sudden it improved dramatically. I only use my PC for documentation really, so didnt need the graphics capabilities. I wonder if when you go to the file menu its trying to do something  out of the ordinary that uses graphics processing.

Might be worth a shot if you can change your graphics cards / drivers?

Regards

Rod