Should still be possible, but I have not done it myself. It used to be easy to just clone the internal drive to an external SSD and boot from that, however that has gotten more complicated with the newer Macs and operating systems. It's a shame to have such a nice computer with the bottleneck of a mechanical hard drive. That might be a factor when it is verifying/updating the Office apps at startup and loading files from the cloud. How fast is your internet connection? I have fast FIOS 400/400. I don't really use OneDrive for anything, although there are a couple small Word files stored there. But I wonder if this has something to do with syncronizing your files on OneDrive? I have Office 365 and Word opens in a few seconds.

I have a 2018 Mini with the same processor as your iMac and it only takes a few seconds for that to happen with a SSD.

Any advice would be hugely appreciatedĨ0 seconds to load the desktop after logging in is really slow. My Mac is just over a year old - 3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB ram. I’m running the latest version of Office and my Mac is running Big Sur 11.2.3. It's usually runs a little quicker after doing this, but over time, starting Microsoft apps becomes progressively slower so I need remove and re-install again. I've completely removed Microsoft apps and re-installed loads of times. It's sooooo annoying and I often just leave the mac running without shutting down. My mac is high spec and everything else runs great, even resource intensive programs such as Adobe run fast. It must be something to do with the sign in. I'm signed into to two 365 accounts - my main account is my personal, but I'm also signed in with my work account for OneDrive, Teams and Outlook. If I quit the Office app and then immediately start the app again, starting will only take a couple of seconds. This is only the case after having shut down the Mac. My Office apps for Mac (especially Word and Outlook) take a very long time to open – sometimes it can take more than 10 minutes to open Outlook! Apologies if I'm in the wrong thread, I'm not sure where to post.

Open office mac big sur