Do this before using PowerPoint seriously
Before you get serious with PowerPoint, do yourself a BIG favor and change a few settings. Leaving them at their defaults can cause small or even big problems.
Check for updates
PowerPoint is complex software and software has bugs. Microsoft works hard to fix bugs as they're discovered. To get the fixes, you have to let PowerPoint, Office and Windows update themselves. .
Whip Windows into shape
Before getting to work in PowerPoint, we recommend making a few changes to your Windows setup.
Make Windows stop hiding your stuff
Make Windows show file extensions and hidden files. Leaving file extensions hidden makes troubleshooting difficult and can cause other problems.
Make sure you've got a printer driver installed and set as Default
See How to select a default printer for instructions.
PowerPoint needs a printer driver.
No. We mean it really really NEEDS a printer driver. One it likes. If you don't give it one, it will cause you pain.
Even if you don't have a physical printer attached to your computer, install a printer driver and set it as your default. Even if you never actually print to this driver, it'll make PowerPoint happy. It doesn't matter whether the printer's connected or not. You don't even need to own a printer.
It should also be a local driver and set as your default printer, even though you never print to it. If your default printer is on a network and the driver's installed on the network too, you'll have problems if the network goes down or if you disconnect from the network. That's the same as having no default printer at all. Laptop users should watch out for this one especially.
How to find the share name and path to a network printer or How to find the share name and path to a network printer (in a new window)
Clean out your TEMP folder
Periodically check your TEMP folder and delete excess files. If there's a lot of stuff in there, it can slow PowerPoint (and other programs) down dramatically. If you don't know where your TEMP folder is, do this:
- Quit PowerPoint and any other programs you're using
- Press Windows Key + R
- In the dialog box that opens, type %temp%
- Click OK
- Click in the Windows File Explorer window that opens, press CTRL+A to select all the files in your TEMP folder, then press DEL to delete them. Windows may not allow you to delete them all; that's ok.
Now start PowerPoint and let's go to work
Now that Windows is behaving, we'll teach PowerPoint some manners.
First, we'll change some default settings that just don't make sense.
- In PowerPoint 2007, click the Office button (the big pizza in the upper left corner) then click PowerPoint Options at the bottom of the resulting screen.
In PowerPoint 2010 and later, choose File | Options. - Click Advanced on the left.
- Change Maximum Number of Undos to something reasonable. Twenty or less seems like plenty; can you remember back more steps than that? Leaving Undos set too high uses more memory.
- Under Print, remove the checkmark next to Print in background. It might seem that background printing would speed up your work, but it probably won't. True, PowerPoint returns control to you a little more quickly when it's enabled, but because it's sharing computer cycles with the printing process, performance suffers (both your editing work and printing). Overall, you'll print faster with it turned off, and you'll avoid being bitten by some of the bugs that live on it.
- We recommend enabling Print inserted objects at printer resolution. This can improve your printouts of e.g. pie charts.
- Enable High quality. Otherwise, glows, transparency and other effects may fail to print.
- Click OK to close the PowerPoint Options dialog box and apply your changes.
We're done with setup. But ...
Here are a few other suggestions that may prevent you from losing your work:
NEVER open from or save to a diskette, CD, memory stick, USB drive or any other removable storage device. Always copy presentations to your hard drive, open them, save them to your hard drive, then copy them back to the removable drive if necessary.
Save Regularly and save often. Here's a good way to work:
- While you're working on a presentation, press CTRL+S every so often to save the presentation.
- Every time you're about to make any major changes, choose File | Save As and give the file a new name. We like to tack on a number ... MyPresentation-001, MyPresentation-002, MyPresentation-003 and so on.
Or if you prefer something more automatic (and elegant), install the Free Sequential Save Add-in by Shyam Pillai
In either case, periodically copy the most recently saved file off to another drive, a network drive, removable storage or the cloud. That way if the computer's hard drive crashes, you don't lose all your work.