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

Anonymous

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?

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Anonymous

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:

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

<dpiAware>False/PM</dpiAware>

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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76 additional answers

Anonymous

2016-04-07T22:14:56+00:00

MMR have you read through the WHOLE discussion? You are replying to something posted a year and a half ago, apparently ignoring all of the later advice.

So, exactly which fixes did you attempt? It is hard enough to guess which fixes you tried, but replying to suggestions that old makes it effectively impossible to guess what you have or have not done.
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Anonymous

2016-04-07T17:56:15+00:00

I have this problem, not only with PPT but also with some other programs (RStudio, for example). The problem I've found with the solution proposed is that is makes any work with graphics extremely clunky. For example, when I use the arrow keys to move several selected objects, it goes incredibly slowly and does not update the display, so I have no idea how long to hold down the key. It's become a huge time sink, takes forever to accomplish simple tasks.
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Anonymous

2016-03-30T20:32:13+00:00

Same here! Yoga 3, so the file is where you indicated, and this fix works. Thank you!
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Anonymous

2016-03-16T16:44:13+00:00

Hi Dan,

I wanted to thank you for your explanation!

What does the "manifest editing fix" causes when i connect my laptop to a projector or other screen?

And one last question, are you aware that this same DPI scaling issue is also found with Internet Explorer. When i drag and drop IE to my external screen the menu bar is not scaling accurate. Is there any comparable fix for this? In the manifest of IE? And if so, can you tell me where to find this file?

Kind regards,

Jonas
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