Powerpoint Office2016 Eyedropper not working

Anonymous
2015-12-01T17:51:55+00:00

Hi

just upgraded last week to Office2016/64 on Win10 and discovered that the eyedropper in the color picker in PowerPoint no longer works. No matter where on the screen I put the cursor I get a gray color as opposed to the color immediately under the cursor as in Office365/2013/64 Powerpoint

help!

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2017-06-26T15:35:44+00:00

I, too, had this problem. Ran Office 365 ProPlus "Office Updates", which took PowerPoint from Build 7369.2130 up to 7766.2092, and the eyedropper issue is now non-reproducible on my machine. Seems if you can do the updates, you should be good to go.

For those who might not be able to update Office, or do and still see the issue, here's a workaround that's not too painful: The issue only seems to affect colors in the PowerPoint application; I was able to pick colors with the eyedropper from other apps just fine. (To do this, after activating the eyedropper tool, click anywhere in a PowerPoint slide, then hold and drag the mouse to anywhere else on your desktop; release the mouse button when over the desired color.) So, to pick a color that's on the slide, screenshot the slide, then use the eyedropper to pick the desired color from the screenshot.

Hope that makes sense...

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-01-19T21:10:53+00:00

    No joy as of right now:

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  2. Steve Rindsberg 99,176 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-01-19T19:51:59+00:00

    I finally got around to installing Win10/64 and a 32-bit version of Office 365 (subscription, not ProPlus) so I could have a look at this.

    After installing, I let it update, it told me I was up to date already; not surprising, since the subscription version's generally going to turn loose of the latest bits.

    The eyedropper works as expected here.

    16.0.6306.2056 is the version it's showing me.

    This isn't in the least to suggest that you're not having the problem or that it's not more widespread;  just that it's not universal for all Office 365 installs.

    So the question is what's different between our setups?  Yours, mine and the other people who've reported the problem.  Let's see if we can collect some info that might help pin it down.  If you'd all post a reply here with the answer to the following, I'll collect the info and pass it along to MS.

    Go to File | Account and look at the info on the right:

    Under "Office" what does it say?  Subscription product or something else?

    What's the current version?

    Click About PowerPoint.  What does the entire top two lines of the dialog box say?  That'll give more version info and also whether it's 32- or 64-bit

    Windows version and "bitness"?

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-01-18T04:07:45+00:00

    Same issue here. Eyedropper has been stuck on blue-gray since around early December. I'm running Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 10/64-bit.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-01-17T11:16:18+00:00

    Is there any update from microsoft?

    deinstallation using office fixit and reinstall of 2013 x32 x64 or 2016 do not change anything

    PowerPoint eyedropper tools Is not working at all

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