How long did it take to load that "blank" excel or word doc, from the time you started the program???
I suspect your problem is the time it takes to load word or excel, not the time it takes to load the document and it probably just means your PC is running slow. You might want to try Defragging the hardrive.
Windows is incredibly slow compared to actually working with the computer. Instead of grabbing one program, it has to go through a group of them to get where you need to be. Such as Windows, where in windows, etc. etc. Every click with the mouse makes the computer run a little program to let it know what it really needs to know and other little programs to bring it down to something the computer actually understands!!!
When you open from an icon with the application closed (i.e. click a word doc icon when word is not already open) it has to FIRST load word, then the document, if you already have word open and then add the document to it, its a much smaller file to be loaded, thus it takes less time
