Mouse scrolling in PowerPoint content add-in not working anymore

Question

Hello!

I’m the author of the babyplots library, a plotting library for interactive 3D plots using the babylonjs render engine. I’ve also created a PowerPoint content add-in to go along with it, where you can embed interactive plots (meaning the user can rotate the plot and zoom in and out) in a slide. This was working really nicely until a recent PowerPoint update apparently made it impossible to scroll in content add-ins.

The previous behaviour was that if the user clicked on the add-in, the add-in was focused and scroll events would register in the add-in. This worked while editing the PowerPoint slide, as well as when the PowerPoint presentation was active.

This is no longer possible, the current behaviour is that even if the user clicked the add-in, scrolling goes to the next slide. Mouse click and mouse drag and keyboard events are still passed to the add-in, but scroll events don't.

You can reproduce this, by getting the add-in from the store (it's free and requires no login for verifying this behaviour), adding the add-in to a slide and clicking on one of the example plots (examples -> select example). You can click and drag to move the camera around the plot, scrolling with the mouse should zoom in and out, but currently does nothing/switches to the next or previous slide in the presentation.

My question is, if there is a way to restore the previous behaviour? If not, are there any workarounds?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Hi @Nils Trost , thank you for submitting a question. It sounds like you're describing a bug with the PowerPoint JavaScript APIs. We use GitHub issues to track bugs with the APIs. To report this issue, I recommend going to https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js/issues, selecting "New Issue" and following the prompts to describe your bug.

Hope this helps.

Alison