Using MS Office Word on my 2020 Mac, it is taking at least 1 minute to open up word documents

Try this: don't quit the Word app completely: just click on the red dot to close it. In the dock you'll see a little black dot under the Word icon

If you try to open a Word doc now, is it faster now?

I have a 2017 Intel iMac 5K with the 4.2Ghz i7 processor and the fastest factory SSD Apple installed at the time. Office apps are slow openers on it, but not a minute.

Are you running any anti-virus apps or so-called "cleainng" apps? They can cause a myriad of issues.

We need a check:I do not see a 21.5-inch (from your equipment line) 2020 iMac (from your text) shown in the "Great List of All iMacs Ever." Please do "About this Mac.." from your Apple menu and tell us wha that shows for your Mac's sub-model.

When you bought it does not affect the sub-model. There was one 21.5-inch iMac that was introduced in 2017 that was still sold into 2020. It was a crippled educational/institutional model. Most had a glacial mechanical hard drive and a slow laptop-class processor. Your description of the issue certainly makes me think of that slow-poke!

Sounds like my 2015 21.5" with 5400 RPM HDD. After a few years, and every upgrade offered, it became almost unusable.

A 500GB external SSD fixed that for less than $100US. Made it a totally different machine and a pleasure to use. Still is as my backup iMac.

I'd advise anybody with a slow HDD that's ruining their Apple experience to go with an external SSD. The difference in performance for me seemed almost unreal.

Or, are these documents on the cloud with Office365? You might have slow internet.

Yep, that seems about right for all our Macs. mulberry58 has the solution.