PowerPoint tips: How to speed up Office 365 performance

We love sharing PowerPoint tips, and this one could make a huge difference to your productivity. Does your PowerPoint run really slowly? Mine did. Particularly the animation pane, and slides with lots of graphics (especially vector graphics). Office 2013 was fine, then Office 365 (with PowerPoint 2016) was ridiculously slow. One solution is to remove the transition animations built into Windows.

But the major problem is probably that you’re running the WRONG version of Office 365, so simply focusing on PowerPoint tips might not be the answer. Windows 10 is offered as a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system, but most people are using 64-bit. Office 365 is also offered in both versions, but the default is 32-bit. I have a Surface Pro, running Windows 10, and Office 365. They’re all Microsoft. Why then, does Microsoft (which controls everything) not build a tiny bit of intelligence into the installation check? Sigh. Anyway, fix it by following these steps:

Check your operating system

1. Search for ‘System’ in the search bar (or Cortana circle).
2. In the System pop-up window, you’ll see the Windows 10 logo top right. In the list of things, look for ‘System type’.
3. If it’s 64-bit Operating System, then go to the next step.

Check PowerPoint version

1. In PowerPoint, go to File on the top left of the screen.
2. Then Account towards the bottom of the menu on the left.
3. Then About PowerPoint on the right, with the question mark icon.

A pop-up will appear with the bit version you are running, at the end of the orange title ‘Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 XX-bit. If it’s 32-bit, go to the next step.

 Uninstall Office

1. Sounds scary. It isn’t. Search for Programs, and select ‘Add or remove programs’.
2. Scroll down the programs list to find Microsoft Office 365 Business, click on it and choose Uninstall. (You shouldn’t need to back-up any files or customizations to Office before you do this).

Install Office 365 64-bit

1. Sign into your Office 365 account at https://login.microsoftonline.com/
2. In the top right, under Install Office 2016, choose ‘Other installs’.

Towards the bottom of the screen, next to Language, it has Version: 32-bit. Click ‘Advanced’, and then 64-bit from the drop-down menu.

Then choose Install at the bottom at the bottom of the page.

Run the Install file that downloads. All your files, customizations, and Outlook files/settings should still work fine.

And once you’ve done that, why not make PowerPoint even better by customizing your Quick Access Toolbar. You can find a download and instructions in our Resources section.

This is now one of my favorite PowerPoint tips, the whole process should take about 15 minutes on a decent internet connection. It’s made a huge improvement to the speed and stability of my Office programs (particularly PowerPoint), as you’ll now be able to access more of the hardware capabilities of your machine to push PowerPoint, and other Office programs. It’s really only going to affect graphics-heavy presentations and huge database-like Excel spreadsheets (anything that requires over 2GB of virtual storage), but it’s impressive how quickly you can get to this level sometimes.

It’s also worth noting that some older plug-ins may not work with the 64-bit version of Office, so if you do use plug-ins, it worth doing a quick check for compatibility. And if you’d like a full list of all the considerations, then this helpful article on the Office Support site has everything you need to help you choose.

If you’re happy with 64-bit and have successfully installed it, then all you need do now is click here.