PowerPoint 2013 Changes display setup

Anonymous
2014-04-17T21:25:47+00:00

Hi,

  1. Begin presentation, computer is set to duplicate/mirror displays.
  2. PowerPoint enters presenter mode, computer automatically changes to extended display.
  3. Presentation finishes, press ESC to exit.
  4. Display is left at extended and not duplicate/mirror.

I found two discussions that are similar to this but not completely:

It seems that PowerPoint is hijacking the display settings, switching it from mirror to extended. it would be great if this did not happen. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2014-11-05T20:01:02+00:00

Hi Everyone -

We're sorry you're having with trouble with PowerPoint - let me give you a bit of context for what's happening, and I'll also give you a solution!

Why does PowerPoint change my display settings?

To enable Presenter View as easily as possible, when entering slideshow PowerPoint will automatically change your display settings (also known as your display topology) to "extend".

Great, but why doesn't it go back when I leave slideshow?

We found that on many computers it was taking several seconds for Windows to change the topology from "duplicate" to "extend". This created a lot of anxiety for people who were often at one of the most stressful points in their presentation (getting it started).

While we're working closely with Windows on reducing the time it takes for the system to do a topology change, we wanted to release a solution to our customers more quickly. Our hypothesis was that many customers weren't familiar with extending their screen (since the default option is "duplicate"), and that their primary scenario for connecting to a second display was to present from PowerPoint. This simplest change to make was to leave the topology as extended, which would ensure that the next time that person presented to a second display they wouldn't experience the topology change delay.

It's clear from the feedback both here on Answers and from other customers that this is a decision we need to revisit since many people are confused by the current behavior and have a preference when not presenting from PowerPoint to be in "duplicate" mode.

Tell me how to fix it!

If you'd like to have PowerPoint 2013 automatically go back to "duplicate" after leaving slideshow, all you need to do is add the following information to your Windows registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\PowerPoint\Options]

"RestoreTopology"=dword:00000001

For those not familiar with editing the registry, here's an easy way:

  1. Create a new file in Notepad
  2. Copy and paste the following:
  3. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\PowerPoint\Options]

"RestoreTopology"=dword:00000001 4. Click "Save As" 5. Name the file "Update**.** reg" (the .reg part is important!) 6. Click "Save as type" and choose "All Files (*.*)" (this is also important!) 7. Click "Save" to exit the dialog 8. Close Notepad 9. Double-click the file you just created 10. Say "Yes" to the prompts (there should be two)

If you'd like to learn more about editing the registry, this article provides more useful information.

Hope this helps!

Dan Swett

Senior Program Manager, PowerPoint

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-10-22T00:17:52+00:00

    Yeah, PPT 2010 handled Presenter View differently. That is, it didn't happen as automatically so people didn't even know it existed.

    I, like some others in this thread, can't use Presenter View when I speak because I'm often demo-ing. So I have to have a second system for my speaker notes (or print them out). What a drag. 

    I actually love that Presenter View is so discoverable now! But PPT really does need to clean up after itself when you finish. Even if it can't do it quickly enough for those of us who demo things, it still shouldn't muck with the duplicate settings once the presentation is really done -- like we need an "okay, we're really finished" button,  heh.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-17T20:53:41+00:00

    I work in IT at a university, and we've been seeing a lot of calls for this problem over the past five months.

    Naturally, we have a lot of faculty members driving presentations from their laptops, so they frequently run into the issue of exiting the presentation only to find their display settings haven't reverted back to duplicate. They call wondering why the projector isn't showing their computer properly anymore. :)

    I've been able to confirm that this isn't just a driver issue with various laptops. It's a problem I've seen on every single computer running PowerPoint 2013. It wasn't an issue with previous versions of PowerPoint on these same machines.

    I hope Microsoft can put a patch on this and roll it out with a Windows Update. We're just one University, so I know it's happening to A LOT of other folks.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-17T16:14:38+00:00

    This article does a good job of explaining how to change your display settings right in powerpoint. 

    http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/learn/powerpoint-2013/enhanced-presenter-view-ppt2013.html

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-06-30T18:16:05+00:00

    I can confirm this same issue. I am an audio/video specialist at a university, and I began running into this issue about 3 months ago. I first only experienced the issue on dual boot Macs that were running PC on one side of the machine. I didn't have any trouble with PowerPoint 2010 on the Mac side, but when using PowerPoint 2013 on the PC side, I was running into the same issue you described above. I was able to resolve the issue about 90% of the time by manually removing the display driver and letting the computer search for a new display driver after restarting the machine. I still don't know what's causing the problem, but either way you slice it, it seems to be something that Microsoft would want to patch up. I have since begun experiencing issues with proper PC machines and PowerPoint 2013.

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