![Powerpoint For Mac Hangs Up Powerpoint For Mac Hangs Up](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125557886/881094007.png)
Hey Dave, I’m puzzled: The Microsoft PowerPoint presentation I’m planning on making tomorrow to a client is running just crazy-slow on my Mac system. I can’t figure out what’s wrong, but it’s 20-30 seconds between when I click on “next” and the next slide actually shows up.
Sep 1, 2017 - Microsoft has announced in a support document that Office for Mac. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Lync have not been tested on. Powerpoint freezing during a Presentation? The Presentation is 33 slides, and we spend about 7-10 minuets on each slide at about the 20th slide it freezes and then take a long time to load or move on the the next slide.
What’s going on and how can I fix it? Note: my friend who asked this question also shared her presentation with me, which was very helpful for figuring out what was going on. I’ll use it as a starting point, but talk about how to diagnose and fix the most common performance issues related to PowerPoint on the Mac and, really, MS PowerPoint on any computer. From what you sent me, it appears that you originally developed the presentation on a Windows PC and then copied it to your Mac OS X system for the presentation itself. While Microsoft might advertise this as a feature of its presentation software, the fact is that it’s really hard to have things work flawlessly cross-platform. The biggest culprit, even after decades of wrestling with this, remains incompatible fonts.
Heck, Microsoft installs a ton of fonts when you install Office on your Mac or PC, and it’s still an issue. Much better to build on the same platform you’re going to use for the presentation itself, but I also know that sometimes that’s not how things work out and since there are a standard set of problems that can cause this performance issue, it’s worth knowing about them. Oh, and Microsoft includes compatibility checking utilities too, though I bet just about everyone ignores its output. But let’s start at the beginning. The deck you sent me was 99 slides, about 12MB total. Not an unreasonable size for that many slides, and the general design was pretty simple, no complicated multilayer backround images or animations Here’s the basic view, with the first slide shown: I like the crumpled paper background, actually.
But as we’ll learn, PowerPoint for Mac doesn’t. The first place to start, however, is to ensure that you don’t have ridiculously large images that are far larger than needed, eating up space and slowing things down.
That’s done through the File Reduce File Size option: Choose it and you’ll learn exactly how MS approaches this: Ideally that’s all you need to do and all is good, but probably not. Next attempt is to do a “save as” and let MSPP fix things: You’ve probably breezed past this dialog box fifty times. What you need to do is look more closely. See the yellow warning symbol?
Adjacent it says 291 compatibility issues. In 99 slides. Click on “Compatibility Report” and the world’s tiniest window pops up, as you can see in the foreground here: The middle is a list of issues its identified — all 291 of them in this case — and if you click on one it’ll give you a (basically useless) explanation in the lower box.
Where it is useful to click on one of the results is that it generally pulls up the relevant slide and highlights the erroneous element too. Look closely at the background above and you’ll see the slide’s headline has been selected. That turns out to be more useful, as is obvious when I step back just a bit: You can see that in the presentation the headline (and, by extension, the headline of every slide) is in the font “Museo 500” which isn’t available on the Mac system by default. Instead of fixing things manually, however, you can actually do a global search and replace for that font, and any other fonts that aren’t available on the Mac OS X system.
That can be accomplished by select ALL your slides (click in the slide sorter view, then select all) then choosing “Replace Fonts”: The window you get shows every font used in the presentation, along with a pop-up of fonts that are available on the Mac system (though it’s not entirely clear that’s what’s going on): Where is this confusing? Because as you can see, it’s fine letting me replace a font ike “Amatic SC Bold” with, well, “Amatic SC Bold”. Pretty useless. But I can also select “Museo 500” and replace it with “Arial” to see if things improve. In fact, none of this made a difference with the particular presentation because it was the background master slide that was causing the performance problem. How did I ascertain this?
By picking a no-background theme. This can be done by clicking on “Themes” and then moving to the “Lorem Ipsum” theme: The slides become alarmingly boring, but all of a sudden the presentation itself moves from slide to slide almost instantnaneously. Ah, so that was the problem. Armed with that knowledge you can then choose a different background theme that’s Mac native and I’ll bet it’ll remain quite speedy. Problem solved, and now you have a number of other solutions to explore too if this happens to you.
OK, more searching solved the issue, which can be found here: My toolbar folders were corrupt. Everything is working again without toolbar customization. But when I start modifying the toolbars again (I need a set of 20 buttons or so to be really fast an efficient in PowerPoint), the whole saga starts again. I will keep you posted about my experience with Microsoft PowerPoint 2011.
I have been battling with PowerPoint 2011 for the Mac for the past hour and it seems seriously flawed. When entering slideshow mode, it just crashes. Searching online for a solution reveals dozens of forum discussions about the same issue that are unresolved. Do not upgrade from Office 2008. Repeat, do not buy it, it is not stable yet! Usually I am an early adopter of software and can live with a few bugs here and there. Not being able to go into slideshow mode kills the purpose of PowerPoint, this is a serious flaw.