UpSlide and Office loading times

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Written by Jérôme | Updated

UpSlide adds up to 4 seconds to the first load of an Office application but should not impact the performance when using the applications. If your applications take more than 10 seconds to load, it could be caused by the antivirus.

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Factors independent of UpSlide

  • 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. More information about this in this article. 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.

UpSlide impact

UpSlide impact can be measured by timing the launch of PowerPoint/Excel/Word without UpSlide and then timing the launch of the same application with UpSlide.

The impact of UpSlide on loading time is about 4 seconds. This is normal for an add-in of this size, and we are constantly working on making it faster.

If the impact is more than 4 seconds, it is probably caused by the antivirus software. Some folders exclusions should be added in the antivirus configuration; see below.

Antivirus folders exclusions

Some antivirus add up to 10 seconds to UpSlide loading time. To solve this issue, some folders exclusions need to be added to the antivirus configuration:

  • C:\ProgramData\UpSlide

    This is UpSlide's default installation folder. If you installed UpSlide in a different folder, you need to exclude that folder instead.

  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\UpSlide

    This is the folder used by UpSlide to store most of its data (settings, library cache, logs…).

  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\assembly

    UpSlide is a VSTO add-in. When an Office application is launched, VSTO copies the add-in assemblies in cache folders and loads the addin assemblies from these cache folders. This is called shadow copy. This behaviour can not be changed (see here). These cache folders are always located in C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\assembly.

Two other folders might be concerned by shadow copy and need exclusions (try first without these exclusions):

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

If UpSlide is still slow after adding these exceptions, please get in touch with us at support@upslide.net.

Important note about Microsoft Defender

When deployed, Microsoft Defender exclusion rules do not support user environment variables. The rules should use wildcards instead.

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