I've just upgraded from Office '97 to 2000. I can just about live with the changes to Word, Excel, and Access but Powerpoint is driving me nuts!

When I open a presentation, the left-hand third of the window is a great white space, with the slides listed as tiny icons at the left-hand edge, and below the image part of the window is another white box for 'notes'. There does not appear to be any way of de-selecting these boxes, though of course I can drag-and-drop the dividers to reduce the left-hand space to a rational size, and I can eliminate the notes box entirely (I have no use for it), BUT there seems to be absolutely no way of saving this window layout, and I have to go through the same process every time I open a presentation.



Is here any way of saving the window layout? If not I am going back to '97, though it will need a little work to my databases, which I have already migrated to 2000.

It's a long time since I used 2000 but I think there was a setting in Options. Something like Open presentations in this view.

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There's nothing I can find, John.

I keep discovering more things to hate about PowerPoint 2000! Now I find that if I run a slide-show the 'View' menu appears on-screen and I can't get rid of it without closing the slide-show. How clever is that?

I can't see any advantage in 2000, so I definitely intend to try to change to '97 tomorrow, though from what I can find online it looks like it may be easier said than done.

Steve.

P.S. In fact the 'View' menu problem occurs when running a slide show from a macro in another presentation, not when I run the slide show directly in its own presentation. Complicated!

I uninstalled Office 2000, ran a Registry cleaner and took out all Office entries I could find, and installed Office '97.

Everything worked except Access, which produced a "Microsoft Access can't start because there is no license for it on this machine" error. I was expecting this from searches I had done, though I thought cleaning the registry might have prevented it. From this Microsoft page I tried the "No Read permissions to licenses key" fix suggested for NT and Win2k, but could find nothing wrong with permissions, so I tried the "Rename a font, and then reinstall Microsoft Access" fix, which did the trick, and as far as I can see, everything is now back to normal'

I should have remembered before installing Office 2000 that new versions of Microsoft software are seldom better than what came before, and tried it out first on an old system, but I was doing a clean installation on a 'new' system, and I had the disc. I'll know better next time!

There doesn't seem to be an option in my forum profile to change the version I'm using to '97. Am I the only one?

Steve.

I don't have access to 2000 but in 2003 it's in Tools > Options >View tab

Default View

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Microsoft PowerPoint MVP 2007-2023
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Thanks, John. I'm certain it wasn't there in 2000. Maybe MS had so many complaints they added the option in 2003!!

I think I did actually install Office 2000 on an ancient system a few months ago, just to see how well overwriting Office '97 went, but without trying it out at all, so when I get time I'll dig the machine out and have another play to see if I can find anything.

Office '97 does everything I need, though, so I don't think I'll be trying an upgrade on my 'everyday' system any time soon.

Yep, I managed to find a copy of 2000 and you are correct! However my good friend Shyam has written a free addin to fix this.
http://skp.mvps.org/setview.htm

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Microsoft PowerPoint MVP 2007-2023
Free Advanced PowerPoint Tips and Tutorials

That looks excellent, John! I'll certainly give that a try when I have the rest of my new installation done, and see if I can iron out any of the other wrinkles I was finding with Office 2000. Fortunately it is much easier installing 2000 over '97 than it is switching in the opposite direction.

Many thanks,

Steve.

P.S. Reading the details again I'm not absolutely certain whether the add-in actually saves the window layout, or just the 'View' (i.e. Slide, Slide Sorter, Outline, etc). I will find out when I try it.

You can set the default to slide view which I think is similar to 97.

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Microsoft PowerPoint MVP 2007-2023
Free Advanced PowerPoint Tips and Tutorials

You're right. Just had a search round online (I'm not home at present), and it does seem to be the 'Normal' view that caused my problem, which, without the add-in you've shown me, is the default view. It appears that 'Slide' view is, as you said, the same as in '97.

'Normal' view does not exist in PowerPoint '97, which is what caused my confusion.

Thanks again, Steve.

Just to say that I've tried the SetView add-in, and it does work a treat! I still have the problem where, when I run a slide-show via a macro in another presentation, the 'View' menu hangs over the slide-show. I will obviously need to make some changes to my macros to get this working properly.