Both opened fully in a second. So just how much faster should these apps actually open?
I suspect this is aimed at Enterprise installations where the machines are gunked up with corporate spyware.
Test those things after a reboot (not a cold start) aka "Fast Startup", that's why you have massive uptime when you always shutdown/start and don't do reboot's.
And this is a pretty average laptop. Dell, Intel Core i7 with 16GB of RAM. In fact it's Windows 11 Home edition.
Now I bet if I tried this same test on my work PC which is supposed to be much beefier I'd probably find that it takes an extra second or two.
This being HN I'm almost 100% certain that the only time anyone touches a PC is at work. And work PCs have loads of gunk on them.
But if you open the 2nd spreadsheet (File > Open) from inside Excel, it opens up a lot faster in a separate window.