Microsoft is giving its Office apps a speed boost

Microsoft is planning to improve the startup speed of its Office apps, starting with Word in May. The launch times of Office apps will improve thanks to a new scheduled task that will run silently when you boot your PC to make sure Word and eventually other Office apps open quickly.

“We are introducing a new Startup Boost task from the Microsoft Office installer to optimize performance and load-time of experiences within Office applications,” explains Microsoft in a message to IT admins. “After the system performs the task, the app remains in a paused state until the app launches and the sequence resumes, or the system removes the app from memory to reclaim resources.”

Word will be the first app to get this Startup Boost starting in May, and Microsoft says “support for additional applications will come in future updates.” Startup Boost will only be available for PCs with at least 8GB of RAM and 5GB of available disk space. Startup Boost will also be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active.

If you don’t want Office apps to start quietly in the background at boot then there will be an option inside Word to disable this behavior. You can always delete the scheduled task too, but Microsoft notes that the Office installer will recreate the task when it applies an update, so IT admins will have to manage this through the in-app setting instead.

Microsoft uses a number of scheduled tasks to run Windows tasks silently and optimize the operating system, but they’re not used regularly by most app developers. Google uses a scheduled task for its Chrome updater, and many OEMs use tasks to update drivers and other system components, but most other apps like Adobe Creative Suite run startup processes in the regular startup section of Windows, where they can easily be disabled.