Why do some programs not rescale when moving across monitors on Surface 3?

Anonymous
2014-09-19T15:57:18+00:00

One of the nice features of the Surface 3 Pro is that in a multiple monitor setup (which I use a lot), windows will scale when I drag them from my primary display to the external one(s). That is, the scaling that is done to increase the size on the high DPI Surface screen is removed when I drag to en external monitor with a lower DPI. Very nice!

But, while this is nice, it doesn't work for all windows programs. Why? My example is, of all things, PowerPoint. Word is fine. Excel is fine, Firefox is fine, so is Thunderbird, Windows Explorer, etc. But when I use PowerPoint on my external monitor, the ribbon bar takes up 10-15% of the screen! Add to that the menu and such and I have less than 75% of my screen for actual work.

Is there anything one can do to fix this?

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2015-05-18T14:41:20+00:00

Thank you for this pointer. Seems that this does, indeed, fix the problem (for me, at least).

For my setup (Windows 8.1, Surface Pro 3, Office 365 - Office 15) the specific instructions are few and simple:

  1. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15
  2. Right-click on powerpnt.exe.manifest and change the permission so you can modify the file
  3. Right-click on powerpnt.exe.manifest and open with Wordpad
  4. Change the line

    <dpiAware>True/PM</dpiAware>

    to

    <dpiAware>False/PM</dpiAware>

  1. Save file

(at least with Office 365, you don't need to do anything in the registry as it's already looking at the external manifest file.)

Yes, line 4 seems counter-intuitive, but it's correct. Once you change this to False, Powerpoint will scale moving from high to lower DPI monitors. I've not encountered any other issues, but I've not used it for very long, yet.

Thanks to the previous pointers/authors for this tip.

(Do read

http://www.danantonielli.com/adobe-app-scaling-on-high-dpi-displays-fix/

if you want more details and the history of this.)

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-11-20T03:49:10+00:00

    We were finding that in most configurations, the slideshow window on the projector would be substantially smaller than expected (due to the dpi mismatch). Depending on the room and the projector, this might be more or less noticeable, but it was fairly consistent.

    We'll take another look just to confirm we're still seeing the behavior, and as I mentioned before we are actively working on making PowerPoint truly dpi aware.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-11-20T03:29:21+00:00

    And thank you for reading this and commenting. This has been a frustrating experience for me for years and I've tried every path I could to both find an solution and get a response as to why things are screwed up and if they were even being looked at.

    I'm curious what the issues are with presentation mode, however. I use it all the time with external monitors of various flavors and don't see any issues with the "false" settting for dpiAware. Not being able to take advantage of my high resolution, external monitors is a major issue, however, so I need to use that setting (as do many others) so we can be productive. So far, I see no trade-offs (except that you are so insistent in resetting this every time there is a major OS update or Office update).

    Thanks, again, for listening.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-11-19T19:37:46+00:00

    Thanks for providing this information, and apologies to everyone who is experiencing this behavior.

    Just to provide a bit more context, the reason that we set <dpiAware> to "True" for PowerPoint (when it clearly is not actually dpi aware), is to ensure that slideshow works correctly when you connect a laptop with a high-density display to a projector/display with a lower-density display.

    Unfortunately making PowerPoint truly dpi aware is something we're still working on, and the default behavior in Windows (when <dpiAware> is set to "false") causes some bad scaling behavior for people using slideshow.

    We had to make a choice between doing the right thing for people dragging PowerPoint between multiple monitors with different densities, and people connecting a laptop/tablet with a high-density screen to a projector to present. We chose the latter to ensure that people giving presentations would always have the best experience, but unfortunately it means that the other scenario doesn't work correctly (as you've been experiencing).

    The workaround that TheZar mentions (editing the manifest) will certainly work, but please be aware that it will degrade the experience when connecting to a projector.

    While I can't give any sort of timeline, we are actively working on supporting mixed display densities correctly. I encourage folks to go to our UserVoice page and upvote this item: http://powerpoint.uservoice.com/forums/288949-powerpoint-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/9967122-improve-dpi-scaling-over-different-monitors-for-al

    This is our primary way for taking feedback on feature ideas, etc and we track it closely.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-11-16T03:44:25+00:00

    Same fix works, you just have to reapply. Seems MS really likes to overwrite changes we make! Same thing happened when I got my 2016 update for Office 365; had to do the fix, again.

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