Working on a Teams based presentation, PowerPoint (the full desktop app) became “stuck” when opening the presentation. Rather than restart the computer and clear whatever was caught in memory I opted to restart PowerPoint in safe mode. Safe mode is opening an application without add-ins, web-based features and other things that are often the cause of PowerPoint crashing.
On a Windows computer, open the search bar and enter “powerpnt /safe” (yes, PowerPoint is spelled wrong, and note the space). Click the top search result.
PowerPoint opens in a bland colorless UI. Note the file name has “Safe Mode” next to it, indicating this is a very limited feature option for PowerPoint. Limitations include:
- No QAT
- No add-ins (installed or web-based)
- The ribbon is the default layout, no customizations are loaded
- Features like auto-correct are not available
- The Recent files and pinned files are not available
No guarantees using Safe Mode will solve issues, but if you need it, it is an option. Also, same process works for Word, Excel, Outlook.
Troy @ TLC