Excel issue

BetsyD

I am asking for a groupmate:

The situation:
1. Have excel table.
2. Connect laptop to a projector.
3. function switch to dual projection.
4. Open excel sheet.
5. Excel freaks out and starts auto-zooming to 400% view. As well as no menu can be clicked on.
6. Nothing short of restarting the computer makes it stop.

What would cause this? Has anyone seen this happen before?

kryyst

Excel is running in presentation mode. I can't remember if the switch to turn it off is in the view tab or in the options view tab. I'm not running excel myself so I can't tell you exactly where that switch is.

BetsyD

Thanks Kryyst. Does anyone know where the presentation mode can be turned off? I did a help search just now and it didn't turn up anything useful.

kryyst

Actually I was mistaken I was thinking of an issue with Power Point not Excel that caused that.

Is does it actually say it's Zooming to 400% or does it just look that much bigger? Because if it just looks that much bigger then it could be the resolution your projector is running at. But I'm not sure why your title bars would be disappearing. When you attach to the projector are you replicating your screen?

CB

Do other things look normal on that projector?

BetsyD

It actually zooms in to 400%.

The setup was that there was a "room" computer thats normally hooked to the projector. Anything displayed on that computer including excel files looked normal sized.

One of my group mates wanted to display a spreadsheet but was having trouble connecting to the wireless to email it to the person logged into the room computer.

Since the back of the room computer is accessible, we unhooked the blue plug for the projector from the room computer and hooked it to groupmate's laptop.

When we did the FN+F# to switch from Laptop only display to Laptop & projector display, excel started automatically *zooming* in to 400%.
We unhooked the projector and then even just on the laptop all microsoft office (word, excel and powerpoint) files zoomed to 400%. Restarting the computer "fixed" the issue. When we plugged the laptop back into the projector it did it again.

The title bar didn't disappear. It was still visible but clicking on the menu items (File, Edit, View...) only "flashed" the menu and there was no way to click any of the items in the menu. Keyboard access to the menus didn't work at all.

I had never seen Excel behave in that manner and it was impossible for me to fix quickly. Luckily I remembered that I had a thumb drive in my laptop bag and we were able to transfer the file that we wanted to look at to the room computer but I want to be prepared in the future with the fix should it be an issue again.

narcissa

I have a user with the same issue, but it's not just Excel. The display resolution gets a little fuzzy, and everything in web browsers will pop up normal size and then get bigger a second later. It also is scrolling down the pages automatically (like you have the space bar pressed down... but it's not). In Excel it zooms to 400% and you cannot change it. The zoom bar will not slide. Everyone else with the same model laptop can plug into the same projector without this issue. I tried updating the video driver but that did not help. It also happens while logged into the same computer as a different user. The laptop is a Dell Latitude D630 with XP Pro and MS Office 2007 Standard.

By the way, I found that logging out of Windows and back in would fix the problem... didn't have to actually restart it. But the problem comes back as soon as we plug the projector back in (using a VGA cable btw).