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
    2017-04-27T00:26:34+00:00

    Wow, Steve is right below. Neither of those links given here even remotely addresses the described problem.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-02-17T04:04:28+00:00

    Steve,

    It works for me too.  I just used it!

    Thanks for persevering.

    Rick

    Hello Rick573,

    A thread that you are following on Microsoft Community has received a reply from Steve Rindsberg.

    Title: Powerpoint Office2016 Eyedropper not working

    Reply:

    I've reported the eyedropper problem to MS and have heard from them that some users have seen the problem go away after applying the most recent WINDOWS updates.

    Can you give that a try and let us know the results?   Thanks in advance.

    Hi guys,

    One of the users in our company had this issue again and same with all the Win7 + Office 2013 builds we have. All had the latest Windows (KB3210131) and Office (KB3127967) updates as of we speak but the eyedropper is still showing the wrong color half of the time.

    Thanks in advance!

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-02-08T11:05:28+00:00

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