Locate PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Where is PowerPoint 2016?

Are you unable to locate PowerPoint 2016 on your computer? Sometimes, such a question can be embarrassing! Or are there other versions of PowerPoint on your computer; maybe older versions? Yes, we know that this can happen, although it does sound a little strange. However, there are perfectly valid excuses for you to be unable to locate PowerPoint, mainly in scenarios such as these:

In an office, where system administrators are responsible for what's installed on your computer, and they insist that you have PowerPoint on your system. However, you cannot find it!
You bought a new desktop or laptop that came with a license for Microsoft Office.
Or maybe you just lost the shortcut that used to launch PowerPoint.

Follow these steps to locate PowerPoint 2016 for Windows:

Bring up the the Run window, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Run Window

If you don’t know how to bring up the Run window, look at our Launch Run in Different Versions of Windows tutorial.
Within the Run window, type “powerpnt.exe” without the quotes as shown in Figure 2, and click OK.

Figure 2: PowerPoint being summoned through the Run Window
If you have PowerPoint installed, it should launch now; otherwise you'll see an error message. In case a version of PowerPoint that is different from the one you were expecting launched, we suggest you follow the steps explained later in the Which Version Do we Have? section.

Which Version Do we Have?

That's a great question! The easiest way to find an answer is to bring up a list of programs installed on your computer. Bring up the Run window as explained in the preceding section of this tutorial, and type appwiz.cpl. Then hit the Enter key. Depending upon your Windows version, the resulting dialog box may look a little different but you still get a list of all programs on your computer. Since this is an alphabetical list, scroll down to where you can see all programs preceded by the words Microsoft Office, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: List of all programs installed on your computer

Note that we have two versions of Microsoft Office installed (highlighted in red within Figure 3, above). Yes, it is acceptable to have more than one version of Microsoft Office (and PowerPoint) installed on a single system. However, only one of these can be the default PowerPoint version. Your default version is the one that launches when you type powerpnt.exe in the Run dialog box, as explained in the preceding section.

Set/Change the Default Version of PowerPoint

So how do you change the default version? Typically the last version installed is the default version, but there are other ways to change the defaults, and all of them do not work all the time!

You can modify the default version by right-clicking any PowerPoint file. Then choose the Open with option in the resultant contextual menu, as shown in Figure 4. This action will let you select from any available program, or even click the Choose default program option. The latter option will let you even browse to, and choose the PowerPoint version that you want to launch when you double-click a PowerPoint file.

Figure 4: Open with option lets you choose the default PowerPoint version
You can change the default version by peeking inside your Registry. Here is a link to a post called Register the Default Version of PowerPoint. Remember that anything to do with the Registry must be done with caution. It is good to have a backup of your complete system in place, just in case.
You can bring up the list of programs on your computer by typing appwiz.cpl in the Run dialog box, and then hitting the Enter key. Once you select the version of Microsoft Office you want to be the default, you will find an option called Change (highlighted in red within Figure 5). Click the Change option.

Figure 5: Change option to be selected

This will bring up the window that you can see in Figure 6, below. Here select the Quick Repair radio button that you can see highlighted in red within Figure 6. Then, click the Repair button, highlighted in blue within Figure 6.

Figure 6: How would you like to repair your Office programs?

This repairs the installation and also sets the selected version as the default one.
This is probably the easiest way. If you want to make PowerPoint 2016 the default version, just launch Word 2016. Word might take a while to launch, and then you can close Word. PowerPoint 2016 automatically becomes the default version. This trick has also worked in the past with PowerPoint 2013, 2010, and 2007.

We have Word, why can't we find PowerPoint?

Even if you have Microsoft Office installed, that doesn't mean you have PowerPoint as well. The reason is that there are some Office editions which do not include PowerPoint; this is not so true with newer releases. If you have a version of Office 2016 without PowerPoint, it may also be that you choose a custom installation option for Office, and deselected PowerPoint? The solution is to run a Repair installation, as explained earlier on this page, and now select PowerPoint from the installation options.