I have numerous word documents that have hundreds of external links to a dynamic excel spreadsheet. Using Word 2003 and setting links to a ‘manual’ setting, I have been able to use this as a great process tool in my business. However, in new Word 2007 xml format, the documents take forever to load due to the external links. It doesn’t matter if I choose to have the links update automatically upon open or not, it still appears that Word is interacting with the excel file no matter what. In Word 2003 I set the links to manual and it would not interact with excel until I ‘forced’ it to do so on an ad hoc basis. However, it does not appear that Word 2007 is working the same, whether thelinks are set to manual or not. If anyone has a workaround for this please let me know, as I can’t switch to the new file format in Office until this is fixed.