Office 2011 for Mac - Powerpoint crashes frequently

[Fireproof!]

I'm having frequent recurring problem with powerpoint on my macbook. I've googled for days, it seems, and can only find discussions about it crashing upon startup - and that's not my problem.

Here's what I'm experiencing:
- Typically it starts up fine, either by clicking the icon, or double-clicking a PPT file.
- Occasionally it will open up a PPT file and won't be displaying any pages in the sidebar. It's like it ran out of memory or something. I can page through all the slides, and they are there. But they don't display in the sidebar. A complete restart of PPT fixes this.
- FREQUENTLY it will randomly crash in the middle of working on a PPT file. I've not noticed any pattern on when it happens - seems to be at random. I do work on a lot of PPT files, and it seems to happen when I've been working on multiple different documents, even though I've closed some.
- FREQUENTLY it will crash when I have existing PPT files open (maybe 2 or 3 will be open) and I'll double-click a new PPT file to open it. Powerpoint crashes.

ANY CLUES? It's driving me nuts, especially since working on PPTs is such a big part of my job.

Thanks in advance.

FYI - I'm on a unibody MacBook Pro (bought it last year) with 750gig HD, have plenty of space. MSFT Office 11 has latest updates - yet this PPT crashing problem has persisted through the last several updates. I keep hoping one will fix it, but no such luck. No other crashing problems with Excel or Word, by the way.

 

[AnonMac50]

I'm having frequent recurring problem with powerpoint on my macbook. I've googled for days, it seems, and can only find discussions about it crashing upon startup - and that's not my problem.

Here's what I'm experiencing:
- Typically it starts up fine, either by clicking the icon, or double-clicking a PPT file.
- Occasionally it will open up a PPT file and won't be displaying any pages in the sidebar. It's like it ran out of memory or something. I can page through all the slides, and they are there. But they don't display in the sidebar. A complete restart of PPT fixes this.
- FREQUENTLY it will randomly crash in the middle of working on a PPT file. I've not noticed any pattern on when it happens - seems to be at random. I do work on a lot of PPT files, and it seems to happen when I've been working on multiple different documents, even though I've closed some.
- FREQUENTLY it will crash when I have existing PPT files open (maybe 2 or 3 will be open) and I'll double-click a new PPT file to open it. Powerpoint crashes.

ANY CLUES? It's driving me nuts, especially since working on PPTs is such a big part of my job.

Thanks in advance.

FYI - I'm on a unibody MacBook Pro (bought it last year) with 750gig HD, have plenty of space. MSFT Office 11 has latest updates - yet this PPT crashing problem has persisted through the last several updates. I keep hoping one will fix it, but no such luck. No other crashing problems with Excel or Word, by the way.

It's been doing that for me too. I use PowerPoint 2004 or Keynote now usually. I export it to .pptx when I'm done. I would like a fix though.

 

[Fireproof!]

It's been doing that for me too. I use PowerPoint 2004 or Keynote now usually. I export it to .pptx when I'm done. I would like a fix though.

Great to hear I'm not the only one.

Would love to find a solution. Been "sending error reporting" forever now and it seems to go in a black hole. Nothing ever gets fixed.

 

[dianeoforegon]

I asked one of the MVPs that know PowerPoint and here is his reply:

I would say he is indeed running out of FREE memory. "Could" be corrupt files, but I would say not, since he refers to multiple files open.

Tell him to Logout at the end of work each day, and restart the computer once a week, and it won't do it.

Tell him the system attempts to perform house-keeping once a day to tidy up the memory, which it can't do if there are any users logged on. The memory progressively becomes more and more fragmented, so the system can't attach the large contiguous slices it needs to read-in a graphics-heavy PowerPoint file.

And the system also purges old temporary files and cleans up the filing system on system start-up, which is why he should shut down on Friday Night and restart on Monday morning (or whenever: the clean-up happens in seconds...)

These are classic symptoms of a machine with fragmented memory, or excessive numbers of files held open, due to never being logged off/restarted.
​

 

[Fireproof!]

I asked one of the MVPs that know PowerPoint and here is his reply:

I would say he is indeed running out of FREE memory. "Could" be corrupt files, but I would say not, since he refers to multiple files open.

Tell him to Logout at the end of work each day, and restart the computer once a week, and it won't do it.

Tell him the system attempts to perform house-keeping once a day to tidy up the memory, which it can't do if there are any users logged on. The memory progressively becomes more and more fragmented, so the system can't attach the large contiguous slices it needs to read-in a graphics-heavy PowerPoint file.

And the system also purges old temporary files and cleans up the filing system on system start-up, which is why he should shut down on Friday Night and restart on Monday morning (or whenever: the clean-up happens in seconds...)

These are classic symptoms of a machine with fragmented memory, or excessive numbers of files held open, due to never being logged off/restarted.
​

Thanks very much for your reply.

He is correct - I almost never turn it off or reboot. Sometimes I'll go for a couple / few weeks without turning it off. I'll shut it down once/week and see if that seems to help. And logout more often.

 

[AnonMac50]

I don't restart and/or log out much as my computer gets REALLY slow. But I have started using a program called FreeMemory. I'll see if that helps.

 

[dianeoforegon]

I asked Jim Gordon, one of the Mac MVPS for Powerpoint. His reply:

This problem sounds an awful like there's a bad font that gets called on
every once in a while. My advice would be to use Font Book to resolve
duplicates and validate fonts. Getting rid of the bad fonts might fix this
problem.

If you have any followup questions, I suggest asking on

Answers -Office for Mac

PPT: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macpowerpoint

 

[MatthewCobb]

Restart helped me

I had repeated problems with PPT as it crashed when I tried to play the presentation. I was required to use the programme for a conference, so could not use Keynote. The only thing that worked for me, was to restart the computer (Office 2011, mid-2012 Air running 10.7.4). This sorted everything out. It's still an awful programme though.