Powerpoint "extend display" setting changes display settings incorrectly when 3 displays are involved

Question

Our scenario; we have new dell laptops and surfaces that are all docked with dual external monitors. When docked, the device display is set to disabled so that ONLY the external monitors are in use as displays. At this point, if you start a powerpoint presentation, the setting "Automatically extend display when presenting on a laptop or tablet" will set the main device back as the primary display with one of the secondary monitors as the extended display. The third monitor exhibits different behaviors but typically just shows as a third monitor (sometimes it will be black if the monitor is old and can't display the surface resolution).

This has plagued us since deploying Office 2013. We thought it was a windows 8 issue initially as we deployed 8 at the same time as 2013. We were never able to put a finger on the powerpoint relationship until now.

The volume of tickets we receive from this issue are very, very high. I can push a policy to set this setting off by default, but this really seems like a bug in the function in powerpoint to me.  

We spent hours researching this behavior of the display settings with 3 displays on windows 8. Hopefully this post will shed some light for those with similar issues as well as get the attention of the Powerpoint team. This is one of those issues that falls easily through the cracks so that those who created the function may not even realize the negative impact.

Answer 1

I, too have had problems with setting up multi-screen displays in PowerPoint. I ended up switching to PowerPoint on OS X, just because I could get it to work easily. Current versions of Windows are not handling this well, it's way more complicated than it should be.

The Microsoft User Voice forums are a place where you can formulate your ideal multi-display workflow, then propose it as a solution. I'm sure there are plenty of other users that would like a more stable setup procedure.