Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

I thought a Mac Mini was pretty much the same spec as a MBA. M1 MBA shouldn't have any problems with PowerPoint.

Probably just has an inferiority complex next to the coffee setup, you'll need to get a fully spec'd Mac Studio to remedy

This is what I thought- but what?

Typically it’ll lock up when I try to move lots of individual elements at one time.

25ish just now.

Can you uninstall and reinstall ppt again?

Maybe- keen to avoid having to dick around with the work 365 install if it can be avoided, although that’s mainly lazinesses

How full is your hard drive? Delete a load of shit.

Not that full.

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Activity Monitor might give you an idea on what it's hanging up on.

I'd look at network stuff - is it trying to push a huge PPT file up to O365 or Cloud?

I use a 12 year old middle-of-the-range macbook and can move around powerpoint with ease...
how many mb is the powerpoint file? above 100mb or so they tend to get laggy. the last terrible office job I had required communicating all ideas through gargantuan powerpoints.
you can make them smaller like this

@Dammit I have a similar issue with excel. I’m guessing its just shitty MS software that needs updated/ reinstalled but I don’t have accreditation with the institution I got the DL key from anymore so I’m hesitant to rock to boat and lose all function.

It's a 525 meg, local-and-Sharepoint slide-deck, running over my usually 800Mbps or so fibre connection, which it's auto-saving via.

download a copy and open it from your desktop and see if the problem continues. If it's trying to autosave a stupidly large file every time you drag something around then that seems like a fairly obvious potential issue

also, 525MB powerpoint? wft

a 525mb powerpoint, and you want to run it over the internet - well there's the problem obviously

also, 525MB powerpoint? wtf

This. Someone needs to learn how to compress pictures for the medium. Unless you’re printing these for brochures, they don’t need to be higher than 150ppi

It’s running locally, in the desktop application, but it is pushing the auto-save data (which I assume to be the changes, not the whole file).

There’s nothing high resolution in there, it’s just a 300 slide master with a lot of images.

If your PPT has to contain anything raster beyond one picture of a person smiling while holding a phone you're in a toxic work environment and should look to change jobs.

It’s still a relatively large file, being synced via Sharepoint, which is notoriously flaky and slow. Try editing a fully decoupled local copy and see how it behaves.

Completely unrelated but something I've learnt this month: If you like lean powerpoint files, don't copy and paste in vectors from CMYK documents because even that simple circle is gonna cost you a meg of file size 🙄

Roger this. I shall attempt to manage The Fear that things crash and I lose my work.

I used to be a conference PowerPoint wrangler, and will never forget the time at a physics conference when a professor put a flabbergasting ‘theatre curtains parting’ animated slide transition, complete with fanfare sound effects, between each of the 100+ slides in his dry presentation.

A sea of dorks trying not to spit their coffee out every time he clicked.

Mmmm. Turn off auto-save for a bit, see what happens.

Brb, on LinkedIn.

it's almost like people with something to actually say don't need fancy formatting??

For people who like reading about Powerpoint as much as I do.

http://www.russelldavies.com/powerpoint
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/power-point-evil-tufte-history/674797/