How to Speed Up a Slow PowerPoint File — Three Ways

Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most commonly used presentation tools out there — but it’s not perfect. It can suddenly slow down, leading to jumpy transitions, frozen slides, and frustrating experiences for you and your audience. Learn how to speed up a slow PowerPoint file by following the steps below.

Method 1: How to Speed up a Slow PowerPoint File by Simplifying Transitions and Animations

Step 1: Too many transitions or animations that are all different can cause lag in your presentations — but this is easy to fix. Start by opening your PowerPoint file.

Step 2: Press Ctrl and A on the keyboard to select all your slides.

Step 3: Click the Transitions option on the top menu and choose your preferred transition style, for example, “Wipe.” PowerPoint will now apply this transition style to every slide.

Step 4: You can also improve the speed of a PowerPoint presentation by minimizing what’s called “by-paragraph” animation. Select a slide, click a section of text, and then click Animations on the top menu.

Step 5: Click Effect Options.

Step 6: Under Sequence, select As One Object. This makes all the text appear simultaneously, which uses less processing power and should prevent your file from running slowly.

Method 2: Clear Your TEMP Folder

Step 1: The TEMP folder holds temporary files needed to run programs and apps. However, those files don’t need to stay there forever. If the TEMP folder becomes full, it can cause apps like PowerPoint (and others) to become slow and clunky to use. To fix this, click Start and type “Run” in the search bar.

Step 2: You should now see an icon that shows Run with System underneath it. Either click the icon on the left or click Open on the right. Both options open the Run command box.

Step 3: Type %temp% into the Open box.

Step 4: Press OK to open your TEMP folder.

Step 5: Select anything that’s marked as a TMP file and press Delete. You can now reboot your machine and see if this has fixed the slow PowerPoint file problem.

Method 3: How to Speed up a Slow PowerPoint File by Clearing Disk Space

Step 1: PowerPoint presentations may also run slowly because of limited disk space. Check your available disk space by opening an Explorer window and looking for This PC.

Step 2: The PC shown has plenty of space on its hard drive. If yours is colored red or has less than 5GB of available space, try the following actions:

• Move any videos and images to cloud-based storage
• Uninstall any apps you don’t use
• Use the Search function to launch Disk Cleanup, which helps organize your available space

Bonus Tip: Reduce the Size of Your Image Files

If your presentation contains photos or stock images, the size of these images could be causing the problem. As seen above, you need plenty of disk space to run a presentation. Click here to see the official Microsoft advice on reducing image sizes in Office applications. You can also reduce the number of images or cut out any long video content or pre-recorded audio.