Why your office apps are slow

Every year the apps get bigger and the laptop stays the same. Here’s where the weight comes from, and why it costs more than you’d think.

The weight is real

The median desktop web page now weighs about 2.9 MB.¹ On a Mac, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint together take 8.1 GB in our measurements, and the Mac App Store lists Excel alone at 1.2 GB.² None of that is wrong in itself: those apps do a great deal. But you pay for all of it every time you open one, whether you use it or not.

Where it goes

Three things make most office software heavy:

• Everything, always. An app that loads every feature up front makes you wait for features you’ll never touch today.
• A browser inside every app. Many desktop apps now ship their own copy of a web browser. Five apps can mean five browsers on your disk.
• Script to run. On a fast laptop a few megabytes of JavaScript is a blink. On an older laptop or a phone, reading and running it can take seconds before you can type.

Why slow costs more than time

A slow start breaks the moment. You open a document to jot down one idea and spend the first ten seconds watching a loading bar; on a train or a school laptop it’s longer. People work around slow tools by not opening them, which is how good ideas end up on the back of an envelope.

What we do instead

• Each page loads only what it needs. Home, a board and a deck load their own parts, on demand.
• We set a budget: the suite’s first download stays under 120 KB of script, and a test fails the build if it grows past that.
• The Mac apps use the system’s own web view instead of carrying a browser each. All five Stetley Mac apps together take 36 MB.
• We measure every release on a slow connection with the processor slowed four times, and publish the numbers with the method.³

Big suites are the right choice when you need all they do. If you don’t, you shouldn’t have to wait for it. That’s the whole idea behind Stetley: office apps that open fast, with no bloat.

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Published 1 November 2026.