PowerPoint 2013 – Use PowerPoint 2010 as Default Instead

I am officially disgusted with PowerPoint 2013 due to the fact they’ve scrapped the essential black colour scheme option, in fact all of the colour scheme options, replacing them with pointless watermark images in the top right hand corner. No plans to reinstate the options as far as I’ve seen. Terrible.

So – if you’ve installed the PowerPoint 2013 Preview and you want it to stop opening all your files by default, instead of the lovely 2010 version, here’s how you do it. The key annoyance here is that all the Office15 exe files are named the same as the Office12 ones. This is how to do it for PowerPoint, same rules apply sort of for other apps…

1. You’ve got to find the exe for the new Office15 PowerPoint 2013, which is conveniently located in a hidden folder. The default path for it is below – just copy paste that in your explorer address bar to reach it:

 C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15

2. If this doesn’t open anything, congrats – you must’ve set up your OS in a bizarre way or installed the new Office on a partition or something. Nevermind, just search from the Start menu for POWERPNT.EXE, you’ll get two hits, right-click on the fancy new PowerPoint icon that comes up and select Open File Location. Now you have it. Go to step 3

3. Rename the fancy-dan POWERPNT.EXE file to something different (like POWERPNT2013.exe). Do this for all of them if you want (WORD, EXCEL etc).

4. That should do it, but just to make sure, right click on a presentation file, choose Open With… Check the ‘Always open this…etc’ box, and click Browse next to it.

5. Then browse to wherever you’ve got good ole’ Office12 installed. For me (Win7 / 64) this is in here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14

But again, if you installed fine-and-dandy Office12 somewhere else, you might have to search again for the original POWERPNT.exe file to get its location. Once you’ve browsed to it, select it, OK everything, and all your presentation files should open in 2010 as before. Repeat as desired for the other office programs, which will be in the same folder as the old PowerPoint one.

Note: doing this might knock out your new shortcuts to the new Office programs in your Start menu/desktop, so you’d have to reset them to point to your new POWERPNT2013 file. But why bother? You’ll only burn out your retinas looking at the shocking white layout…