Powerpoint Office2016 Eyedropper not working

Anonymous

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!

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Anonymous

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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91 additional answers

Anonymous

2016-01-27T06:04:57+00:00

Steve, I meant the magnifier was not running at all. (Since running the magnifier creates a clean repro for you, I wish I could say it was running, but it's not.)
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Steve Rindsberg 99,176 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2016-01-26T19:59:25+00:00

Chris:

Following up on this magnifier thing: by not used, do you mean "running but not magnifying " or "not running at all. shut down. Dead, jim"?
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Steve Rindsberg 99,176 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2016-01-26T19:57:41+00:00

Mark,

I found that under Win 10, if I so much as launch the Windows magnifier, leave it at 100%, the eyedropper problem appears.

I can leave the eyedropper selected and active (and not working), hit the close box on the magnifier tool, and voila, the eyedropper's good again.

I passed that along to one of the people at MS who's looking into this and he was able to repro it there. That's A Very Good Thing. What cannot be reproduced cannot be examined and cannot usually be fixed. Being able to repro the problem is sometimes the biggest part of the fix.

And thanks for all the info and followup. Your comment about the magnifier pointed me right at what turned out (we're all hoping) to be the solution. And maybe a decent workaround while we're waiting for the fix.
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Anonymous

2016-01-26T07:23:41+00:00
My answers...
- Magnifier: set to 100% when opened for this test, but otherwise not used
- PPT version: MS PPT 2013 (15.0.4787.1000) MSO (15.0.4787.1002) 32-bit
[Is there a way to just copy & paste the version info? I couldn't find one...]
- Windows version: 10.0.10586 Build 10586
- Kind of graphic card: Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000
- Does it work if you turn off hardware acceleration: No
- Resolution: 1920x1280
- "Change only the text size": 9 for all menu options ("Title bars," etc.)
- Custom Scaling Level: 100%, 9 point Segoe UI
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