For months, everyone swore the laptop used in the conference room was too old and didn’t work.  “I know the video settings were set correctly last time we used it!”  The video settings would be checked and reset, then everything would go back to normal.  Then the following week, when someone would try to give a presentation we would hear them say “the video settings are changed again!”

Well chances are it is not the PowerPoint gnome sneaking around in the middle of the night changing video settings on computers.  No, it probably happened when you hit play on your PowerPoint presentation.

To backup for a second, there are two ‘display’ scenarios for a computer connected to a projector (on a Windows 7 machine).  First, the video settings are configured such that the screen on the computer is cloned, or duplicated, on the projector screen.  This setting is helpful if you have presenters with Excel spreadsheets or Word documents where the ‘slideshow’ button is not available.  The second option is to treat the projector as a second monitor.  For those of us who have two computer monitors at our desk, we know that having this setup allows us to view say a web browser on one monitor and a Word document on the other. This also happens to be the setting PowerPoint will switch to when you press play on your slideshow.

To demonstrate that PowerPoint can change your video settings (unbeknownst to you) , set both your video settings to ‘cloned display’.  Now load a PowerPoint presentation and start the slideshow.  When we tested this, we noticed the screens will flicker for a few seconds (the video settings are changing), then the slideshow appears on the projector screen and the computer screen displays the ‘presenter’ view with the navigation controls for the presentation (which are missing from the slideshow).  Now stop the PowerPoint presentation and see if both screens are cloned or extended.  If we go back to our video settings, sure enough they have changed from ‘cloned displays’ to ‘extended display’ (which means the projector screen is essentially a second monitor).

There is a solution to this.  One is to set the Slideshow/Monitor settings within PowerPoint 2013 to ‘Primary Monitor’ or anything other than automatic (as mentioned in this article).  Another (my choice) is to update your Windows registry using the method mentioned in the article, that will revert your display settings back after stopping a PowerPoint presentation.

You should still educate your users on this video setting swap issue.  You may want to write instructions stating that they either need to change the video settings to show their spreadsheets or progress reports or they need to ‘drag’ them from the computer screen to the projector screen.   There are so many display options these days that it is difficult to keep up with where the settings are being controlled (be it within presentation software such as PowerPoint your video driver settings).  If you want to quickly get to the display settings in Windows 7, press and hold the Windows key and press ‘P’.