Office 2013 Tip: Disable Animations

While Office 2013 offers a visually attractive new take on Microsoft’s venerable office productivity suite, some may be put off by the animations that appear across each of the applications. The worst, possibly, is a typing animation effect in Microsoft Word that can be distracting to those who spend a lot of time in this application. Fortunately, you can disable animations in Office 2013 if you know the trick.

Unfortunately, the change is global: There’s no (obvious) way to disable animations on an application-by-application basis. So if you want to disable animations in Word but leave them on in Outlook—where Microsoft uses an animation to visually transition between the Email, People, and Calendar experiences—you can’t.

I had previously described this animation effect in Awful Typing Animation In Word 15: The Video. That video was based on the Office Technical Preview, and while the effect has gotten less noticeable since then, it’s still present. But at the time, I asked my Windows Secrets co-author Rafael Rivera to find out whether this effect could be turned off. And after he investigated how Office 2013 works, he found a way.

This week, Rafael has published the fix in his post Disabling animations in Office 2013, which still works in the currently-available Public Preview version of Office 2013. It’s available as a downloadable registry tweak which you can easily install. But the entry within looks like so:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0CommonGraphics]
"DisableAnimations"=dword:00000001

To see the effect, you’ll need to reboot your computer. 

To reverse the effect, change the value of the added DWORD to its default of 0.