>I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS

Test those things after a reboot (not a cold start) aka "Fast Startup", that's why you have massive uptime when you always shutdown/start and don't do reboot's.

Ok so I've just done this and got the same result. It's plenty fast.

And this is a pretty average laptop. Dell, Intel Core i7 with 16GB of RAM. In fact it's Windows 11 Home edition.

Now I bet if I tried this same test on my work PC which is supposed to be much beefier I'd probably find that it takes an extra second or two.

This being HN I'm almost 100% certain that the only time anyone touches a PC is at work. And work PCs have loads of gunk on them.

I have a different issue. First window of Excel starts fast, but try to open another file and you'd think that I just didn't click on it. 10 second wait times and I'm on a private machine without any corporate bloat.

I noticed that too. Double click xlsx outside Excel and wonder if it did anything.

But if you open the 2nd spreadsheet (File > Open) from inside Excel, it opens up a lot faster in a separate window.