PowerPoint 2013 lockups

I’ve run across this little gem a couple times lately. I’ll be working in PowerPoint 2013, everything’s going swimmingly, then I’ll click the Design tab and …

 

And nothing.  PowerPoint locks up.  Completely.  And nearly locks up the system with it.

 

Any work in progress is lost, and it can take several minutes even to get Task Manager up in order to kill the POWERPNT.EXE process.

 

I thought an Office repair had sorted it out, but darned if it didn’t bite me again today.  And here’s what I found out:

 

If I use the little widget in the upper right corner of the PowerPoint screen, the icon to the right of the ? icon and tell PowerPoint to Show Tabs, as opposed to Show Tabs and Commands (the default), then the next time I start PowerPoint and touch the Design tab … instant PPTDeath.

 

If I quit PowerPoint with Show Tabs and Commands set, it’s in that mode when I restart and I can then tell it to show just tabs. 

 

That is, I can do that if I want to take a chance on forgetting to reset it and getting whacked (again!) later on.

 

Nah.  I think I’ll just consider this a dangerously broken feature (a “killer feature” in a very real sense!) and slap my hand every time I even think about using it from now on.