Numbers documents open slowly from iCloud on all Apple devices

Question

Level 1

12 points

Numbers documents open slowly from iCloud on all Apple devices

Why does opening a Numbers document saved on iCloud take ages? It’s not my internet, as it does the same on any network, even cellular. Every other file, be it pages pdfs or my cad files opens almost instantaneously, but 30seconds to literally 2 minutes for numbers.

This has been happening for a while, at least since iOS 17, for my wife and I. We are both on ios and iPadOS 18.7.2 and macOS 15.7.2. Most of our numbers documents are business documents, that are in a shared iCloud folder. I’ve tried saving directly to my computer, as well as other documents that are on my iCloud only, but nothing helps.

Unless I can see definitive proof that updating to 26 will solve this problem, we are happy on the versions we are on. I tried 26 in a VM, but since apple wont let me use the App Store in a VM, that doesn’t work.

Posted on Nov 23, 2025 5:04 AM

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Answer 1

Badunit

Level 7

30,348 points

Dec 9, 2025 12:54 PM in response to azaksalmarzur28

azaksalmarzur28 wrote:

Break the shared-file metadata

This solves the issue more than anything else.

Really? What does that mean? How do you do that? Sounds like another worthless AI answer.

To the OP: Sorry you have received no responses (not REAL and USABLE responses). I'm not a big user of iCloud or iOS Numbers so I'm not much help. Your message title is that it happens in iCloud but you said saving them to your computer doesn't help. Are you saying that Numbers files stored on your computer are slow to open on your computer? Are these documents shared via iCloud? If so, have you tried unsharing them?

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Answer 2

Dec 9, 2025 10:39 AM in response to hiker769

Break the shared-file metadata

This solves the issue more than anything else.

Reply