How to disable smooth/fluid scrolling in office 2013 (Excel/Word)

There is a registry setting that allows you to disable all animations across Office 2013 (thus not affecting other programs). It is explained in simple terms here: [Tip] Improve Microsoft Office 2013 Performance by Disabling Unnecessary Animations. There's a download at the end of the post with the corresponding .reg files to enable or disable animations; just double click on the "disable animations" one.

In summary:

• create the following key in the registry if it does not exist yet: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics
• create a new DWORD DisableAnimations in that key and set its value to 1

There's no way to selectively disable some of Office 2013 animations; it's an all-or-nothing proposition. sotong's answer to this question disables all animations across Windows.

EDIT

For those who don't have access to the regedit UI due to user privileges, this can also be done from the command line. Use (Win)+R, run cmd then paste in for Office 2013:

reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics ^
/v DisableAnimations /t REG_DWORD /d 1

For Office 2016:

reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Graphics ^
/v DisableAnimations /t REG_DWORD /d 1

(all on one line).

This worked perfectly for me:

Windows Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools > Adjust Visual Effects

Uncheck the first option: Animate controls and elements inside windows.

Note however that disabling this will also disable any animations regarding Windows' buttons, scollbars, taskbar icons and popup windows, start button, copy dialog, etcetera.^[1]