PowerPoint X: Outline pane clips text horizontally

[Kevin Camera]

I have tried reinstalling Office several times, and even tried the
free trial again to see if my problem goes away, but it's here to
stay. I posted about this once before, but never heard anything.
This bug is just too major for no one else to complain about, but I
don't know what else to try...

In PowerPoint X on Mac OS 10.2, all my text in the outline pane gets
clipped on the right side. No matter what I set the zoom level to,
the text always gets cut off instead of wrapping. Even stranger is
that the text does wrap at some point, but this invisible point at
which the text does wrap is way off the visible part of the pane.

Also, the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the pane does show
that there is room to scroll, but when I scroll, it only moves a few
pixels or so, and never makes it anywhere near the end of the line.

Can anyone help with this, or at least confirm they are seeing the
same thing? I don't know what else to try, and this is a major bug in
my opinion.

Thanks!
Kevin

 

[Steve Rindsberg, PPTMVP]

It sounds as though the width of the outline window is getting tracked in
several places and that they've gotten out of synch.

What happens if you change from normal to slide view and back a few times?

Does it happen in all presentations or just certain ones? What happens if
you create a new blank presentation from scratch?

Have you tried deleting your prefs files?

--

Steve Rindsberg PPT MVP
PPTLive ( http://www.pptlive.com ) Featured Speaker
PPTools: http://www.pptools.com
PPT FAQ: http://www.pptfaq.com

 

[Kevin Camera]

I just noticed that the text actually wraps correctly when I set the
zoom level in the outline pane to its smallest value: 25%. But at any
zoom level higher than that, the text gets cut off.

So apparently PowerPoint is always wrapping as if the zoom were 25%,
regardless of what the actual text size is, causing higher zooms to be
cut off.

Is no one else seeing this? It does it on the free trial as well as
the version I get at school...

 

[Kevin Camera]

One last correction... sorry.

The text does actually wrap when the outline pane is resized, but only
up to a certain point. This point scales with the zoom level. So at
25% zoom level, the text will wrap *no sooner* than the default pane
size when PowerPoint is launched. If you shrink the pane at all, the
text is cut off (and like I said before, not even the horizontal
scroll bar will get it back -- the scroll bar will only move the view
by a few pixels). If you expand the pane, the text will rewrap after
a few second delay (before, I never waited for long enough, I guess --
don't know why it takes so long).

If the zoom level is increased, to say 50%, the text will still wrap
as long as the outline pane is *twice* its original size, since the
zoom level is twice as high. Anything less, and the text is cut off
again. Everything else (useless scroll bar, etc.) is the same.

The side effect of this behavior is that if the zoom level is ever
higher than 66%, the text will never fit on my screen. Even with a
zoom level of 50% or so, which I normally like to use in outline mode,
the outline pane would have to fill the entire window to prevent
clipping. It's not very useful like this.

Besides the major problem above, there are some other small bugs in
the wrapping code when the pane is resized. For instance, even if I'm
not in the clipping range, when I resize the pane by a small amount,
the text is often wrapped a little farther than the visible area, and
I have to widen the pane a little more to make it visible. So even
when it does adjust, it still can't get the wrap point right.

Any MS staff have an idea? Am I really the only person seeing this?
I doubt Apple will replace my PowerBook because it's the only one that
can't render text in PowerPoint

 

[Kevin Camera]

When I change back and forth between views, nothing changes. The
outline pane is exactly the way it was before. This happens in all
presentations, including brand new ones which are created from
scratch. The very first line I type into a new file starts acting
this way. I have wiped out my preference files, as well as running
Remove Office and reinstalling from scratch. It does this for all
versions, including the free trial.

I wrote a reply to my original message, but maybe it didn't get
accepted by the newsgroup server... I've narrowed down the behavior a
little more. What happens is that the outline pane has a minimum
width at which it will wrap the text. This width seems to be the
default size of the outline pane when you first fire up PowerPoint at
33% zoom level. If you shrink the outline pane at all to be smaller
than this minimum size, the text will get cut off. The scrollbar at
the bottom doesn't work either -- when the text exceeds the outline
pane, the scrollbar will appear and show there is more text to the
right, but moving the scrollbar will only shift the view by a few
pixels! On the other hand, when I make the outline pane larger than
is needed, the text will fill the available space and wrap normally
(although it takes a few seconds after resizing before the pane is
re-wrapped). It's only when I go below this minimum width that the
lines get cut off.

This minimum wrap point scales with the zoom level. So if I set the
zoom level down to 25% instead, the new minimum will be 3/4 as wide as
it was at 33%. And if I set the zoom level to 66%, it will be twice
as wide as at 33%, and so forth. This means that at about 50-66% zoom
level, I cannot see the end of my lines of text even if I expand the
PowerPoint window to my full screen size.

So the bug seems pretty fundamental, although I am amazed that no one
else has commented on this problem. The only thing left for me to try
is restoring my entire hard disk to the factory image, but I'd really
like not to do that...

 

[Steve Rindsberg, PPTMVP]

Hi Kevin. I saw your other reply with the additional detail later. Thanks
for posting that very detailed description.

So the bug seems pretty fundamental, although I am amazed that no one
else has commented on this problem.

If it were happening to everybody, I'm sure we'd have seen reports of it by
now.
That's the problem with some of these weird ones ... they may get triggered
by the oddest things or by a combination of them that only occurs on a very
few computers.

I haven't seen it myself, but then I've only had Office X/Mac for 24 hours
or so now. <g>

Here's hoping that someone else knows what to do about this.

I've got one idea that might be a decent workaround. In older versions of
PPT there was a plain Outline view. Just the outliner, no notes or slide
panes. That's still there in PPT/X, but you have to customize it into
being.

Choose View, Toolbars. Click Customize. On the Toolbars tab, click New to
create a new toolbar if you like, but it's not necessary. On the Commands
tab, click View in the list on the left, then locate Outline on the right
side list and drag it to the toolbar of your choice.

OK the Customize d'log box. Now you can click your new Outline view button
and go into a fullpage outline view.

Does it behave better in this mode?

 

[Kevin Camera]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for trying to help with this problem. I agree -- if this was a
"native" bug in PowerPoint, these boards would be flooded with
complaints. So it's something very particular about my system...

I tried the special outline mode you suggested, and the bug still
appears. Of course, I have a lot more screen real estate to use, so I
can work much more comfortably (so thanks much for at least providing
a workaround). But there is still some minimum screen width at which
the text stops wrapping and just gets cut off. I should be clear that
in this mode, I am changing the whole window size, since the whole
window is outline view and not just one pane. In addition to the
wrapping bug, the horizontal scrollbar also remains useless, since
even when it appears, moving the scrollbar only shifts the view by a
couple pixels.

But thanks for the idea, and like I said, at least in this alternate
outline mode I have more area to use. But the minimum-width wrapping
and scrollbar bugs are still there. Someday when I reformat and
reinstall Jaguar, I'll install PowerPoint first and then see what
software causes the fault. You can be sure I'll post again when I
find the culprit

For the record, I have a 15" Ti PowerBook G4 1GHz with an ATI Radeon
9000 Mobility, running Mac OS X 10.2.6.

P.S. -- Please note that posts #5 and #6 in this thread took a real
long time to show up, and are actually *older* than my reply to Steve
above.

 

[Steve Rindsberg, PPTMVP]

Hi Kevin

Well, I guess a shoe that's only a little too tight's better than one three
sizes too small.

Definitely do post back if you ever work out what the heck's causing the
problem. Thanks!

--

Steve Rindsberg PPT MVP
PPTLive ( http://www.pptlive.com ) Featured Speaker
PPTools: http://www.pptools.com
PPT FAQ: http://www.pptfaq.com