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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Anonymous

2016-08-22T19:12:02+00:00

I looked at the manifests from Excel and Word (which don't seem to have scaling problems, at least not in my case) and the corresponding line is <dpiAware>True</dpiAware>, notice it doesn't have the \PM, nor it is set to FALSE (which will cause the blurriness).

It seems to me some people at Microsoft keeps forgetting/ignoring to update the manifest for PowerPoint.
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Anonymous

2016-08-22T18:24:54+00:00

I think this is somewhat missing the point.

Changing the manifest file is a work around. I can confirm this makes Powerpoint "work" on multiple screens however when back on a single screen the laptop (I'm on Windows 10) is fuzzy which annoys me so I have to switch the dpiAware setting back again, depending on whether or not I happen to be using multiple screens or not.

I can put up with this for the time being however there are lots of other apps which don't work at all, for example Skype for Business is hopeless on the second screen - It doesn't scale at all.

I was hoping a proper resolution to this problem (pun intended) would be included in the anniversary release however it does not seem to be fixed yet.

Very poor show Microsoft.
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Anonymous

2016-08-22T18:11:07+00:00

Try changing the line to <dpiAware>True</dpiAware> instead of <dpiAware>False/PM</dpiAware>
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Anonymous

2016-08-22T18:09:43+00:00

If you are having issues with PowerPoint looking blurry on you higher DPI monitor after the solution try changing the line <dpiAware>True/PM</dpiAware> to <dpiAware>True</dpiAware> (BTW, that's how it appears in both Excel and Word's manifest for which I didn't have scaling issues)
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