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
    2015-11-24T05:24:57+00:00

    I tried it with a Microsoft genius at the Microsoft store with a Surface 4 and a dock in the store demo. Happens only with PowerPoint. The genius was surprised.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-11-20T22:42:42+00:00

    Having the same problem on a Surface Book.  Switching to dpiAware False does not help.  Very inconvenient as I work extensively in PowerPoint and travel most every weeks to plug in to some projector somewhere.  Very motivated to get a real fix.

    Thank you.

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  3. 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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  4. 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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