AskVG

[Tip] Disable Smooth Typing Animation and Transitions to Make Microsoft Office Faster

- Last updated on by

UPDATE: This tutorial will also work in newer Office versions such as Office 2016 and later.

Most of us are enjoying the recently released free preview version of Microsoft Office 2013 (codename Office 15).

Office 2013 and later versions come with many new features and enhancements. Microsoft has tried to make Office UI matching with Windows 8. Office 2013 and later feature a clean and minimal UI without any Aero glass or blur effects as present in previous Office versions.

Advertisement

Newer versions of MS Office also come with some animations which are shown while typing text, switching between menus, etc. These animations look cool but users with slow computers might not like them.

Today in this tutorial, we are going to share a small Registry tweak to disable animations and transitions in Microsoft Office applications. It’ll help you in improving all Office apps performance.

So if you are also one of those people who are finding the smooth typing animation and other transition effects annoying in Office programs and want to disable them, just follow these simple steps:

1. Press “WIN+R” key combination to launch RUN dialog box then type regedit and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor and go to following key:

For Office 2013:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common

For Office 2016:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common

For Office 2019:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\17.0\Common

Advertisement

2. Right-click on Common key and select New -> Key option. It’ll create a new key, set its name as Graphics

3. Now in right-side pane, create a new DWORD DisableAnimations and set its value to 1 as shown in following screenshot:

Disable_Animations_Office_2013.png

4. Close Registry Editor and open any Office 2013 application. Changes are instant and you’ll no longer see any animations and effects in Office 2013.

5. If you want to restore default animations, change value of DisableAnimations to 0 or simply delete the DWORD.

PS: If you don’t want to modify Registry yourself and want a ready-made Registry script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and run the extracted REG file, it’ll ask for confirmation, accept it:

Download Registry Script to Disable Animations in Microsoft Office 2013

Download Registry Script to Disable Animations in Microsoft Office 2016

Also Check:

[Tip] Make Mozilla Firefox Faster by Disabling UI Animations

Published in: Microsoft Office

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

You are here: Home » Microsoft Office » [Tip] Disable Smooth Typing Animation and Transitions to Make Microsoft Office Faster

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. Thank you so much! I disabled animation and hardware acceleration as you instructed, and now Word 2013 is as fast as its predecessor.

  2. Great tip, thanks, I was looking for that!!
    I had to create the key in registry (Office 2013 not running), as it wasn’t there before, but now all’s well!

    Hate such animations, find new interface alright, but agree with above poster: Colours’ contrast is far too low. Not easy on the eyes, although having turned colour to “dark grey”…

  3. Thanks for the tip!!
    Just started using 2013 and the speed difference was immediately noticeable. After this registry change things are much better.

  4. Excel 2013
    New workbook
    Add values 1 to 100 by column
    Hold down right arrow, 52.5 Seconds to get to 100 from 1.
    safe mode had no change, neither did disabling hardware acceleration.

    Added this key, did the same thing,
    22.5 Seconds, still slow as hell, but better.

    Excel 2010 over RDP window: 4 seconds.

    What???

  5. Good post. I have also noticed that the typing animations can be removed through Ease Off Access. But, I am not entirely sure how well the feature was disabled as compared to the registry edit. Here’s a post I found with step-by-step screenshots – fix now support.com/3/post/2013/07/how-to-disable-typing-animation-in-office-2013-fixing-the-cursor-lag.html

    Vishal, do you think RAM can influence the typing animation? Lets say you have a 4GB RAM, do you think the typing animation would seem less lagging?

  7. SWEET! thank you

    although I still want to create less animation, less “windows for dummies” and actually just get some friggin’ work done

    thank you!

  8. Visio 2013 x86 was super slow on a Dell Vostro machine running Windows 7 Professional x64. After a series of troubleshooting, I traced the problem to the accelerated graphics. Just disable the it. Here’s how: Go to Visio Options > Advanced, scroll down you should see “Disable hardware graphics acceleration”. Check the square box. This issue is most noticeably on machine with dual video chip set.

  10. Thank you so much – this has made a huge difference to me as I work in Word all the time and previously the lagging was awful. Now it is much speedier and makes me a much happier Word user!

  11. There is a much easier wayof disabling the animation by doing this

    Control panel > System and security > System > Advanced system settings (in upper-left side) > Advanced tab > Settings in Performance box > Visual effects tab:

    Uncheck the “Animate controls and elements inside windows.”

  12. Worked great! Big help! I had to create it with the .reg file because I didn’t have that key at first…

  13. Thanks, this worked for me.

    Checking the ‘Disable hardware graphics acceleration’ tab alone did not do the trick.

  14. Hi VG, Excel 2013 was implemented on W7. I use 15 files with several sheets where the files are linked. The files were made in 2003, originally. Made above animation disabling but after few steps the Excel is crashing still. Do you think that the formulas made in 2003 can cause such a crash? I use Dell i5 laptop, where I have the CPU running between 80-100%, since the 2013 is installed…
    Tried to change to manual calculation of the formulas… no effect. Tried to disable the automatic update of external links…. desperate thing to find out that I have to adjust in each file separately…!
    Is there a difference for above poor handling between Home and Professional version?
    That’s all for the moment and greatful for your support!

  15. ^^ Sorry, no idea. You can try to repair Office 2013. If it doesnt help, you can uninstall the new version and reinstall old version of Office to work on your files without any problem.

  16. Thanks for your reply! Did you get a similar question from others, as well? Did you try and have similar result as me? Does above answer refers to the Pro version, too? Do you mean, that 2013 is so poor…that there’s no way to improve/solve this issue and I trough the money out trough/to WINDOWS?!

  17. ^^ I dont use Excel too much so I cant help in this issue. Thats why I suggested above things. 🙂

  18. Thanks for your advise! Repair was a good choice and now is working not so fast as I would expect, but without freezing, at least. Thanks again.

  20. Excel 2013 was performing sluggishly eg it took 10 seconds to commit a value onto a cell. My spreadsheet had coloured/highlighted rows and after removing them, Excel performed remarkably better.

  21. Excellent! You just made my day, as the frustration was really unbearable. It got to the point that I switched to Notepad to write up a quick text and then pasted it to Word… Thank you very much for this.

  23. I recently upgraded at work from 2010 to 2013 and immediately hated it. Outlook is awful and Excel is much slower than 2010. Well, I couldn’t do much to fix Outlook; I tweaked a few font and size settings and changed to dark gray color scheme and it’s now liveable. Excel was still painfully slow when updating the formula 5000+ rows because of the pointless animation.

    I want to thank Ivana for what ultimately worked for me (no disrepect to VG, tried your disable animation and didn’t work for me. Been coming to your site for years and will continue to do so!!). I copied the solution below:

    There is a much easier wayof disabling the animation by doing this

    Control panel > System and security > System > Advanced system settings (in upper-left side) > Advanced tab > Settings in Performance box > Visual effects tab:

    Uncheck the “Animate controls and elements inside windows.”

  24. Thanks so much for posting. the HKEY method didn’t work for me but the Control Panel method of disabling animations did!

  25. Hi VG

    Thanks for the suggestion, could you please confirm if making this change in Current_User would be applied to all users who logs in? We have a admin id that we applied this reg key, however if another admin logs in, he cant see this key at all. So not sure if the key we apply gets replicated to a normal user when they login. We Cannot verify this as normal user doesnt have admin privilege to launch regedit and check, hence the question.

    thanks

  28. This works in Office 2019 too. (So thank you very much indeed! I’m breathing a sigh of relief!)

  30. AWESOME!!!! I could not STAND the new cursor “animation” lag in Word and it was making me totally c.zy! This was a super easy quick fix, even though it seemed daunting at first. I’m a much happier user now!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

NOTE: Your comment may not appear immediately. It'll become visible once we approve it.