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
    2016-05-15T17:36:55+00:00

    Absolutely

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-06-02T18:10:04+00:00

    Powerpoint was literally unusable on my external monitor until I found this very obscure help topic. The ribbon and window chrome filled up most of the screen, with my document being a tiny box in the middle.

    Please escalate this fix to the PowerPoint core team, they need to change the default here. For every person that finds this help topic, there are many others suffering with PowerPoint being unusable.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-06-08T03:09:43+00:00

    Unfortunately, it does not solve the problem, because it makes the whole thing blurry, as expected.

    Worth mentioning, that PowerPoint 2007 scales all right on a second monitor.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-06-10T00:32:07+00:00

    Looks great on my monitors. I think this is dependent on monitor resolution. I have zero complaints about blurriness. Your mileage may vary... PPT 2007 was superior in this regard, however. Wish they could use that "old technology" to solve this problem. Really annoying to have to keep reapplying the fix every time MS pushes a PPT update to me...

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