Archive of posts filed under the Microsoft Office category.

Change text size in Notes pane of PowerPoint

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In one of my PowerPoint slide decks, the Notes pane at the bottom in the Normal View showed the presenter notes in a very large font. When looking at the font size however, nothing seems to be wrong: it was 10.5 points, which seems to be the default.

It took quite some googl’ing until I finally figured out that somehow the Zoom factor of the Notes text was changed.

To reset it to the default size:

  1. Click in the Notes pane
  2. In the Ribbon, in the View tab, click Zoom
  3. Set to 100%
  4. Click OK.

You can also change the size of the Notes pane text  by holding the CTRL key and use the scroll wheel of your mouse, while hovering over the Notes pane.

Weird issue with missing encryption on Android phone

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I receive my work email on an Android phone (Moto X – 2nd gen). My employer requires that the phone be encrypted in order to access email. This is enforced with EAS. It worked fine for months but yesterday, around noon, I no longer received email. Instead, I got a message that my account required a security setting update. When tapped OK, I was transferred to the “Encrypt phone” page, which was odd, because the phone was already encrypted. But the only option I had was “Encrypt phone”, so I tapped that. The phone rebooted, I saw the Android logo for a second or two and then the phone booted normally. No encryption took place – which actually made sense, as the phone was already encrypted. Yet, the “Encryption needed” message continued to pop up.

I contacted my HelpDesk and they confirmed that on the server side, everything looked fine. So it had to be an issue on the phone, but the Settings > Security > Encryption screen clearly indicated that the phone was Encrypted. So I decided to further digg into this. It took a while, but in the end I found out that the issue was caused by an app that at first sight, had nothing to do with the problem: Battery Overlay Percent. The app adds a battery percentage to the battery indicator in the Notification Bar. To be precise, the issue is not caused by the app itself, but by one of the (optional) settings: in order to show the percentage also when the drawer is pulled down, you need to enabled a setting in Accessibility:
2015-05-29 13.46.30_resize

I enabled that, but didn’t realize that that also impacts a Security setting: with this change, a PIN-code is no longer needed to unlock the phone. This is another requirement enforced by EAS. So this change caused the Exchange mail to stop working. Unfortunately, the error-message is incorrect: the problem is not that the phone is not encrypted, the problem is that the PIN is not asked from the lock screen or when powering on the phone. I assume the check is not done properly and whatever the missing element is, the error-message always show “Encryption required” and then redirects you to the Encryption screen… which is useless because the phone is already encrypted. (I would call this “sloppy programming”, but OK).

When I looked into all possible causes, I finally realized what was going wrong when I saw the following in Settings > Security > Screen Lock:
2015-05-29 12.29.12_resize

When I tapped the PIN setting, I got
2015-05-29 12.29.44_resizewhere I selected Require PIN to start device and then the issue became clear:
2015-05-29 12.29.49_resize

Turning off the Accessibility setting in the Battery Percentage Overlay app made my email come back!

In fact, I could have known this, as I got the following screen when activating the optional setting:
2015-05-29 11.45.55_resizebut to make the link between this and no longer receiving company email still is a stretch 🙂

Editing Contacts with the full Contact Editing Form in Outlook 2013

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I like Outlook 2013, with useful improvements like inline replies, calendar sneak peak and performance improvements. What I don’t like, however, is the default way how double-clicking a Contact works. In Outlook 2013, you get a Contact Card with only a few of the details that you can edit:
outlook2013_contact_default

I prefer the “old” full contact editing form when double-clicking a contact.
You can do that by clicking on Outlook (Contacts) in the View Source section:
outlook2013_contact

 

That will open the full Outlook Contact Editing Form:
outlook2013_contact_full

I learned about this by reading Open the full contact editing form in Outlook 2013 on MSOutlook.info.
The article has more information about this behavior and even provides you with a few options to disable it.