Supercharge your PowerPoint productivity with
Supercharge your PPT Productivity with PPTools - Click here to learn more.

Proud member of

PPTools

Image Export converts PowerPoint slides to high-quality images.

PPT2HTML exports HTML even from PowerPoint 2010 and 2013, gives you full control of PowerPoint HTML output, helps meet Section 508 accessibility requirements

Merge Excel data into PowerPoint presentations to create certificates, awards presentations, personalized presentations and more

Resize your presentations quickly and without distortion

Language Selector switches the text in your presentation from one language to another

FixLinks prevents broken links when you distribute PowerPoint presentations

Shape Styles brings styles to PowerPoint. Apply complex formatting with a single click.

Find and Delete PowerPoint's PCB file

What's a PCB file?
When you (or another program or addin) customize your copy of PowerPoint by adding or removing or moving toolbars or buttons, PowerPoint stores the customization info in a special PCB file.

Sometimes this file becomes corrupt and causes PowerPoint to misbehave. You may need to find and rename or delete it to solve the problem.

What's a PCB file good for?
Not much, or at least there's not much the average user can do with one.

The main reason to find it is to delete it. Some add-ins can make your PCB file grow quite large over time. The bigger the PCB file, the slower PowerPoint starts up. PowerPoint 2000 may refuse to start at all when the PCB file gets over a megabyte (it'll usually hang at the startup screen in this case).

Some users have copied their customizations to other computers by copying their PCB file; sometimes it works, but it's not supported by Microsoft.

On the other hand, you could make a copy of your own PCB file before customizing PowerPoint extensively, or before reinstalling it; that way you could copy it back and restore your existing customizations.

Always do any PCB file copying/deleting/moving while PowerPoint isn't running.

Where's the PCB file?
That depends on the Windows version, the PowerPoint version and whether or not your system's set up for multiple users.
Rather than bore you with the rules, we'll let Windows' fingers do the walking:

There should ordinarily be only one, named PPT.PCB or POWERPNT.PCB or similar. If there are more, you want the one called .PCB, where is your user name on the system.

You can right-click the file and choose Rename to rename it to something with a different file extension (.BAK, for instance) or simply delete it. When PowerPoint starts up again, any customizations will be gone; when it needs to, PowerPoint will create a new PCB file.

If deleting the PCB file doesn't solve the problem, you can always rename the original file back to its original .PCB name (after deleting any new PCB file that PowerPoint created in the interim.


Did this solve your problem? If so, please consider supporting the PPT FAQ with a small PayPal donation.
Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape Contents © 1995 - 2022 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.

Supercharge your PPT Productivity with PPTools

content authoring & site maintenance by
Friday, the automatic faq maker (logo)
Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker

Find and Delete PowerPoint's PCB file
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00404_Find_and_Delete_PowerPoint-s_PCB_file.htm
Last update 07 June, 2011
Created: