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?

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

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.)

0 comments

76 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-04-07T14:24:51+00:00

Ditto, same PowerPoint problem has been around for quite some time. Not limited to Surface - same problem on laptops. Very disappointing that the Office team hasn't addressed this.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2015-03-31T15:22:31+00:00

Really? When I first got my Surface Pro 3 back in August I noticed this right away and Googled it (maybe Binged it, too) and it's a known issue. No solutions, it seems. Really odd that Word, Excel, etc. all work but PPT does not. And it's so bad (the scaling) that it's actually hard to use as the menus and such take up so much space on the screen.

Thanks for your efforts!
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Steve Rindsberg 99,176 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2015-03-31T14:46:34+00:00

>> Sigh... Seems Microsoft doesn't care.

Or doesn't know. This is the first time I've seen the problem reported.

I'll pass this along so they do know, at least.

Thanks for the detailed report/screenshots.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2015-03-30T21:55:54+00:00

Nice idea, but it was already in mouse mode and touch mode just makes things worse.

The problem is not that it's too big/small but that it doesn't change when moving across monitors with different scaling.

Sigh... Seems Microsoft doesn't care.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments