Hello experts, I'm banging my head against the wall. I have PowerPoint (version 2013) and used Tom Kuhlman's beautiful Blue Tops Tab template for a training I designed (take pity, I'm a rookie). It's nice on my screen but when I send it from my Surface to: an older Surface, a Mac, and a PC tablet, the spacing moves around on some slides, for no particular logic. We all have version 2013. I tried saving it as different types of PowerPoint files but to no avail. I've attached it, hopefully it looks "normal" when you view it. Thanks in advance for any expert insights.
I see the shift you are referring to, between slides 3 and 4. It is happening because there are extra spaces at the end of each line of text in the text box on slide 4. See the attachment - the gray boxes represent the extra spaces.
To fix, remove the manual spaces at the end of each line. You can use the keyboard combination Ctrl/Shift at the end of a line of text (on a Windows machine) to manually break a line if needed.
Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise. I'm going to apply the fix that you shared and use that approach in the future.
What I'm still struggling with is that other things (not related to forced spacing like I did) go awry when I send presentations to my colleagues and they open them on their devices. For example, a text box I made that fits the shape I created will be much smaller when they open it. Also, the font appears lean/stretched on their devices. It's a strange mystery I've yet to solve and I can't find the logic in it.
My thanks to you and the rest of the users of this forum. I am so overwhelmed by the level of talent and expertise (I've watched some amazing presentation templates with my mouth hung open) as well as the willingness to share that expertise with others to support them in growing their talents and increasing the quality of the products they are creating. It is very powerful and a fabulous learning community to be a part of!
I may be misinterpreting what you are doing - are you sharing the actual PowerPoint presentation and seeing different results on different devices? This may be due to an issue with incompatibility between PowerPoint presentations and display on devices other than desktops. A quick Google search indicates that Microsoft PPT presentations don't play well on iPads, as one example.
Not sure if that is at all helpful, but hopefully it is in some way.
You are saying fonts display differently as well on different machines? That could be something like a font substitution issue..... In other words, not everyone may have the fonts installed that you do.
Might want to try this... try converting a problem slide over to a PDF document. Then distribute that to the same people. See what happens. This may help you narrow down if the issue is display based as Nancy suspects above (and I tend to agree), or if it's somewhere else.
Thanks Nancy, my VP of IT figured it out after a zillion "have you tried saving it as______". It is the issue that Bob suggested after your post. But thanks so much for taking the time to troubleshoot, that's really kind of you and you've certainly touched on one of our struggles since our employees have a myriad of different devices. Thanks again!
Bob that was it! What a nightmare. Turns out I have a different set of fonts than some of our users who haven't had some of our newer updates. I can't believe it was something that basic. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Maybe everything I create will now be in Times Roman (just kidding). Have a great day.
6 Replies
Hi angela,
I see the shift you are referring to, between slides 3 and 4. It is happening because there are extra spaces at the end of each line of text in the text box on slide 4. See the attachment - the gray boxes represent the extra spaces.
To fix, remove the manual spaces at the end of each line. You can use the keyboard combination Ctrl/Shift at the end of a line of text (on a Windows machine) to manually break a line if needed.
Hope that helps.
Nancy
Hi Nancy,
Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise. I'm going to apply the fix that you shared and use that approach in the future.
What I'm still struggling with is that other things (not related to forced spacing like I did) go awry when I send presentations to my colleagues and they open them on their devices. For example, a text box I made that fits the shape I created will be much smaller when they open it. Also, the font appears lean/stretched on their devices. It's a strange mystery I've yet to solve and I can't find the logic in it.
My thanks to you and the rest of the users of this forum. I am so overwhelmed by the level of talent and expertise (I've watched some amazing presentation templates with my mouth hung open) as well as the willingness to share that expertise with others to support them in growing their talents and increasing the quality of the products they are creating. It is very powerful and a fabulous learning community to be a part of!
Hi angela,
I may be misinterpreting what you are doing - are you sharing the actual PowerPoint presentation and seeing different results on different devices? This may be due to an issue with incompatibility between PowerPoint presentations and display on devices other than desktops. A quick Google search indicates that Microsoft PPT presentations don't play well on iPads, as one example.
Not sure if that is at all helpful, but hopefully it is in some way.
Nancy
Angela,
You are saying fonts display differently as well on different machines? That could be something like a font substitution issue..... In other words, not everyone may have the fonts installed that you do.
Might want to try this... try converting a problem slide over to a PDF document. Then distribute that to the same people. See what happens. This may help you narrow down if the issue is display based as Nancy suspects above (and I tend to agree), or if it's somewhere else.
Thanks Nancy, my VP of IT figured it out after a zillion "have you tried saving it as______". It is the issue that Bob suggested after your post. But thanks so much for taking the time to troubleshoot, that's really kind of you and you've certainly touched on one of our struggles since our employees have a myriad of different devices. Thanks again!
Bob that was it! What a nightmare. Turns out I have a different set of fonts than some of our users who haven't had some of our newer updates. I can't believe it was something that basic. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Maybe everything I create will now be in Times Roman (just kidding). Have a great day.
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