Hi,

All of a sudden, a perfect PowerPoint and Excel-linked setup has taken a turn for the worse and the Powerpoint file is now using 10-12 minutes to open. It would be amazing to solve this issue with some guidance from the community. In advance, thank you for taking the time.

What:
A PowerPoint with linked Excel charts to be able to automatically update all graphs using a VBA macro

• This presentation is uploaded to Sharepoint, as a non-macro presentation, and shared with the team for collaboration
  Until about 4-5 week ago this was a problem-free setup with unnoticeable load time when opening the PowerPoint-file

Problem:
The PowerPoint presentation will open but it now takes about 10-12 minutes from double-click to the file opening

• The PowerPoint file will use about 20 seconds for the first 80% of the load and then 10-12 minutes for the last 20%
  The problem is just the same if I open a locally saved version of the Powerpoint presentation, or a version saved on SharePoint

Makeshift solution:
The problem with PowerPoint using a long time to load does not occur in two scenarios:

1. If all links to any external files are broken
   If the linked excel workbook is opened before the Powerpoint

• These two options are the current makeshift solutions but they are far from optimal as we collaborate with team members that does not have access to the linked excel workbook and because breaking links makes the presentation considerably less dynamic

Hypothesis: A new update from Microsoft is causing the Powerpoint to go through all links and this is causing the additional load time of 10 minutes

Additional information:

• I have disabled Powerpoint from asking if it should update links. However, I don't think this should have any effect as the problem occurs before the file is actually opened.
  Excel-workbook: It is saved on my local hard drive, in this folder: C:\Finance_model. This is the only file linked to the PowerPoint presentation.

Best regards,
Andreas.