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.

 

 

High quality image exports from PowerPoint 2013? No, sorry.

It’s a sad thing. 

 

With a bit of registry wizardry or some VBA, we’ve always been able to export slides to PNG, JPG and other image formats at much higher resolutions than the default 960 pixel jobbies PowerPoint gives you when you do a Save As and choose one of these formats.

 

You still can.  Unless you “upgrade” to Office 2013.  If you do that, you’ll find that PowerPoint will cheerfully produce images at high-pixel-counts, but if you look closely at the results, you’ll see that they’re blurry. Fuzzy.  Unsharp. Nasty. 

 

They look for all the world as though PowerPoint has exported them at its default 960 pixel resolution then upsampled to the final resolution.  In other words, PowerPoint has exported a low resolution image and invented the extra pixels to pad it out to high resolution.  Ick.

 

So.  What can you do about it?

 

If you plan to use PowerPoint to produce images to be printed as posters or in journals as many scientist/academic PowerPoint users do, don’t plan to do it with PowerPoint 2013.  If you can, stick with an earlier version of PowerPoint, even as far back as 2000 (but if you use 2007, be sure it’s updated with any available service packs … early releases had their own evil ways with image exports).  Your eyes, your publisher and your readers will thank you.

 

If you’re stuck with Office 2013, consider saving your slides as PDF and submitting the PDF to the printer/journal.  Any of them worth their salt should be able to handle PDFs, and the results will be far superior.

 

If you’re considering an upgrade to Office 2013, understand that low-quality images are the downside.  You can always install one of the click-to-run editions alongside your existing earlier Office installation and use the most appropriate version for the task at hand.   Or leave your money in your pocket until Microsoft finally decides to fix this problem.