How UpSlide impacts Office startup time

Written by Emmanuelle | Updated

As a VSTO add-in, UpSlide can add up to 4 seconds to the first load of an Office application. This is expected and does not affect performance during use. If your Office applications take significantly longer than this to load, the most likely cause is your antivirus software scanning UpSlide's installation folders. This article explains the factors that affect Office startup time and how to configure antivirus exclusions to resolve slow load times.

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Expected startup time

UpSlide impacts Office loading time by approximately 4 seconds. This is normal for an add-in of this size, and we are continuously working on reducing it.

You can measure UpSlide's exact impact by timing the launch of PowerPoint, Excel, or Word both without UpSlide and with UpSlide. If the UpSlide impact exceeds 4 seconds, adding folder exclusion could improve performance.

  • The first launch of an Office application after a reboot will always be longer than the subsequent launches. This is due to the .NET cold start.  Note that this cold start impact can also occur when launching an Office application after some time without using Office. This period can be 20 minutes or more. To the best of our knowledge, there is no way to control the duration of this cache.
  • Other add-ins may also have a significant impact on loading time.

Factors impacting startup time

There are three factors that can affect Office startup time:

  • Antivirus scanning. Some antivirus software scans UpSlide's folder on every Office launch, adding up to 30 seconds of loading time. This is the most common cause of unusually slow start up times.
  • .NET cold start. The first launch of Office after a reboot is always longer due to .NET initialisation. This can also occur after a period of 20 minutes or more without using Office. This behaviour is independent of UpSlide and cannot be controlled. More information about this in this article.
  • Other add-ins. Third-party add-ins loaded alongside UpSlide can also contribute to slower startup times.

Solution - Antivirus folders exclusions

To prevent your antivirus from scanning UpSlide's folders on every Office launch, add the following paths as exclusions in your antivirus configuration:

  • C:\ProgramData\UpSlide. UpSlide's default installation folder. If UpSlide was installed in a custom location, such as C:\Program Files, you need to exclude that folder instead.
  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\UpSlide. The folder used by UpSlide to store settings, library cache, and logs.
  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\assembly. The cache folder used by VSTO to load add-in assemblies at Office startup. This behaviour is built into VSTO and cannot be changed.

Two additional folders may be afected by VSTO shadow copy. Add these exclusions if the issue pesists after applying the ones above.

  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Deployment
  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Temp\Deployment

Important note about Microsoft Defender

When deployed via policy, Microsoft Defender does not support user environment variables. Use wildcards instead.

  • C:\ProgramData\UpSlide
  • C:\Users\*\AppData\Roaming\UpSlide
  • C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\assembly