PowerPoint 2013 Always Starts Minimized

This post has nothing to do with Oracle or Enterprise Manager at all, so if that’s all you’re interested in you can stop reading now. 🙂

Yesterday I ran into the situation where PowerPoint would only open minimized on the task bar and nothing I could do would get it to budge from there. The only way I could get PowerPoint to start and be displayed on any monitor was to start it in safe mode. [As an aside, to start PowerPoint (or indeed any Office product) in Safe Mode you just need to hold down the Control key while double-clicking either the PowerPoint program or any PowerPoint document.] After starting PowerPoint successfully in Safe Mode, I could see PowerPoint on my screen, but when I closed it down and tried to restart in normal mode, it would always start minimized.

So one answer is simply to start always in Safe Mode, which of course means a variety of things are disabled or don’t work fully. Not a very good answer. 🙂 I searched a bit further afield, and found some Microsoft notes that basically explained the screen X-Y coordinates for PowerPoint may be corrupt (actually the notes were talking about Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint, but the explanation applies in either case). In the support note, it suggests 3 different methods to fix the issue:

1. Maximize the program
2. Use the move feature to reposition the program into view
3. Edit the registry

Obviously you should work through these from top to bottom, but I had already found that the first two did nothing in my situation, so I was left with editing the registry.

IMPORTANT: As always, as the Microsoft note says, “Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to back up, restore, and edit the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 256986 Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry”. In other words, do the rest of this at your own risk!!!

The note that I found from Microsoft talked about removing a registry key that for me didn’t exist. Of course, it was somewhat dated and there may be a more up to date version that I hadn’t found. In any case, here’s how I fixed the problem:

• Run regedit.exe to start the Registry Editor
• Navigate through the tree to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\PowerPoint
• Right-click on “Options” and select “Export” to save a backup in case I needed it (which in fact I did – see below for the reason)
• Delete the “Options” key completely

Voila! PowerPoint now started and displayed on the screen as I expected.

NOTE: I might also have been able to simply delete the entries Bottom, Left, Right and Top in the Options key, but I didn’t try that directly. Maybe if someone else that has this situation arise can test this and put a comment back on this post, we can see if that solution works as well. There were other options listed such as PersonalTemplates, ToolbarConfigSaved and so on that it could have been useful to keep. I added those back by editing the export I had taken beforehand to remove the Bottom, Left, Right and Top entries, then opening the Registry Editor and importing them back by choosing File -> Import, which merged the entries from my backup into the Options key.