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

2015-11-24T09:38:08+00:00

Another temporary fix which might help the resolution problem is to start the laptop connected to the external monitor with the lid of the laptop closed. So turn the laptop on and directly close the lid. In this way, the resolution of the monitor is used. Afterwards, you can open your laptop and work with the laptop and external screen.

Make sure that closing the lid 'does nothing' in your poweroptions.
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Anonymous

2016-01-05T02:01:16+00:00

Having the same scaling issue with Internet Explorer 11, any plans to fix the scaling issue happening across multiple screens there too?
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Anonymous

2016-02-09T23:55:48+00:00
I've now spent 4 hours on the phone with Microsoft Support and they INSIST that this is a problem with my monitors / laptop not the DPI Scaling. So much so that they won't help me change the manifest settings (I'm blocked from changing them for some reason
- file is not read-only). If there is anything that can be done to resolve this and to let the tech support team know the work around in the interim I would greatly appreciate it. My productivity just went from 100% to 0% due to this issue. Thanks!
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Anonymous

2016-02-10T19:16:00+00:00

If you can't change it, then it's because it's read-only. If you right-click on the manifest, it may not show that it's read-only on the Attributes line, but if you have not made it writable, for you, it will not be. That is, if you have not done the following, do it now :-)

Right-click on the manifest file.

Click the Security tab on the top of the window

Click Edit

On the next window, select your account name

Check Allow by Full Control

OK the dialog boxes

You should be able to edit/save, now.
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