Office 365

A while ago, someone asked in the Forum if it was worth upgrading from Office 2010 to the current version of Office 365. The general consensus seemed to be that in a few specific cases there were improvements that might make it worth it, but that, in general, there wasn’t anything overly compelling if you didn’t need those specific improvements.

When I bought a new Windows tablet around Christmas 2015, I got a coupon for a free year of Office 365. Since it was getting close to the coupon’s expiration date, I activated the free subscription last September (intending to install it on the Atom-powered tablet), but I didn’t install it on anything (and still haven’t).

Through the HUP, I got the opportunity to get a cheap copy of Office 2016 Professional a few months ago. I installed it on a PC that had just had a clean Windows 10 install. Previously, I had been using Windows 2010 Professional (also acquired through the HUP years ago).

My experience with Office 2016 has been less than ideal. Office 2016 is so slow compared to Office 2010. I’ve done unscientific side-by-side comparisons of Office 2016 on a quad core desktop and Office 2010 on a dual core laptop (with the same underlying CPU, just one is the quad core version and the other is the dual core version). I mostly use Word, Excel and OneNote, and the Office 2010 version of all three run significantly faster on the laptop than the Office 2016 version on the PC (both devices have SSDs and 4 GB of RAM). I’m assuming the performance degradation is related to the “cloud integration” features of newer versions of Office; although, OneNote in Office 2010 syncs with the cloud and doesn’t exhibit any slowdown like OneNote in Office 2016.

Has anyone else seen this, that Office 2016 is so slow compared to previous non-cloud versions? To me, it seems painfully slow and, as discussed in the previously referenced Forum post, I haven’t run across anything I use in the newer version that didn’t exist in the older version.

Is there some setting I should try fiddling with in order to better optimize performance, or is this just a fact of life with the newer version and something I’ll just have to grin and bear if I want to continue using it? If there’s nothing that can be done, I definitely won’t be installing Office 365 on a low-end Windows tablet. I can’t imagine the performance would be anything other than awful.