Office 2013: Disable transition and cursor animations

Issue

When using Office 2013 you have all kinds of nice animations when moving around in the applications. E.g., in Excel 2013 you can see smooth animation of cell selector moving from cell to another. In Word/Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint 2013, you can see cursor smoothly moving when typing text, or in Outlook, there is transition animation when you move between Mail and Calendar. In some scenarios these neat new animations are not desired. Good thing is that one can easily disable them.

Solution

1. Right click on My Computer icon on the Desktop and choose Properties option OR just hit Win+Pause
2. In the System window click the Advanced system settings link in the left pane
3. Click Continue button if prompted by UAC
4. Now click Settings button under Performance section
5. Select the Custom and check the option Animate controls and elements inside windows to enable animations
6. Click OK button
7. Click OK button in the System Properties window

Another solution

The above solution affects all animations across all applications. In order to only limit this within Office 2013, do as Paul instructs and add the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics]
"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.