When KeyTips first ran in PowerPoint, tapping Option on the busiest tabs felt slow. The measurement confirmed it: 0.66 seconds from the tap to the badges.
That doesn’t sound like much until you think about how these shortcuts are used. You’re typing from memory, and your fingers don’t wait. A pause that long is enough to make the tool feel broken.
The cause
For each badge, KeyTips searched the whole ribbon again to find that one control. PowerPoint’s Home and Insert tabs have a lot of controls, so that added up to a lot of repeated searching.
If you work in Excel, you’ve seen this. It’s a sheet with thousands of lookup formulas, each scanning the same large table from the top.
The fix
KeyTips now reads the ribbon once when it needs to, then uses that result for every badge. The time for the same tap dropped to 0.03 seconds, about 20 times faster.
It’s the same fix you’d use in a workbook: load the data once, then look things up from that, instead of making every cell do the full search.
Three things worth keeping
- Measure before and after. “It feels faster” is an opinion, while 0.66 and 0.03 are evidence.
- Look for repeated work first. Nothing here was slow individually. The cost came from doing a reasonable thing far too many times.
- Test on the biggest case. The problem was hardest to miss on PowerPoint’s busiest tabs, so that’s where to look.