How to prevent PowerPoint 2013 from mucking with my laptop display mode?

I have an EliteBook 8570p in a docking station, with an external monitor and keyboard attached.

I typically have my display mode as "duplicate", with the same thing  showing on both my laptop screen and external monitor.  I use the external monitor as the main screen. This might be uncommon, but I prefer it this way.  I've been working this way for quite a while.

I very recently started using MS PowerPoint 2013.  Today I discovered an annoying bug (feature?) with this combination.  I was in "slideshow mode" for a pptx I was working on, and I pressed ESC to get back to editing the doc.  What happened was that the external monitor just showed my background wallpaper, and the laptop screen showed the normal display, along with my background wallpaper.  I then had to slide over to my laptop keyboard and press Fn-F4 and set it to "Duplicate", and that restored my external monitor display.

I don't like this behavior.  I also noticed that when I go into slideshow mode, the display on the laptop screen is different from what I see on the external monitor. It looks like it's showing an "intelligent" view of the slideshow, with a big panel showing the current page, and the next page in a smaller panel. That's interesting, but I don't want it to do that if I'm in "Duplicate" display mode.

Is there a way to get the "older" behavior from PowerPoint 2013?

February 11th, 2015 2:52am

Hey David,

what you have just experienced is a PowerPoint feature called "presenter view" - on the second monitor you see the fullscreen slideshow, on your primary monitor you see much more - current slide/slide notes/next slide, ...

By default, it seems that PowerPoint 2013 has that option turned ON, so if you want to get rid of it, just turn off PRESENTATION/USE PRESENTER VIEW checkbox :)

Cheers,
Milan

Let me know if it works for you ;)

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February 11th, 2015 3:03am

Thanks Milan for the explanation.

And the mentioned option can be found by going to the "SLID SHOW" tab>"Monitors" section on the ribbon in PowerPoint 2013.

Regards,

Ethan Hua
TechNet Community Support

February 11th, 2015 9:37pm

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