Excel And The Internet

[bibblebub]

Here's an oddity for which I'm hoping someone can think of an explanation -

If I am not connected to the internet then both Word and Excel open immediately whether I'm creating a new file or opening an existing document/spreadsheet. Likewise, if I'm connected to the internet using my usual dongle (3 Mobile) then everything is tickety-boo.

However, if I tether my T-Mobile (or should that be EE?) smartphone to get internet access then, when opening an existing spreadsheet, there is a delay of anything up to 30 seconds before Excel starts as normal; this is not a one-off, it happens every time. The delay does not occur if I'm creating a new spreadsheet and Word always opens normally for both new and existing docs so it's only when opening an existing spreadsheet.

Are there any Excel/Office settings that could account for this anomaly?

[sunny-dave]

Guessing here (so don't quote me) - but it's conceivable that Excel is either connecting to its online help facility or is looking to resolve any possible hyperlinks in the Excel data.

[Old_Geezer]

It must be checking something in the background before opening an existing file. It's likely to take noticably longer on a slower mobile connection than your house internet.

(I expect it is T-Mobile as you'd expect faster on 4G :-) )

[bibblebub]

My "house" internet is the mobile dongle on the 3 network and, since I don't (yet) have 4G on that, there's not a lot of speed difference between it and the phone tethering.

The spreadsheets involved are my own creations and there are no hyperlinks within them.

So that leaves the online help possibility, and that's why I mentioned that Word has no problems because I reckoned that something like help would be common to the Office suite - have just tried Powerpoint and OneNote and there’s no problem with those either. Also I have checked that there are no active addins so that seems to rule them out.

Oh well, it doesn’t matter since I only occasionally use tethering.