Pen doesn't work during slide show in PowerPoint 2003

PPTools
Shape Styles brings the power of styles to PowerPoint. Apply complex formatting with a single click
Merge Excel, CSV or tab-delimited data into PowerPoint presentations to create certificates, awards presentations, personalized presentations and more
FixLinks prevents broken links when you distribute PowerPoint presentations
Optimizer saves disk space and bandwidth, shrinks your PowerPoint presentations to the right size for email, screenshow or printing
PPT2HTML gives you full control of PowerPoint HTML output, helps meet Section 508 accessibility requirements
Prep4PDF preserves interactivity in PowerPoint presentations when you convert to PDF
Image Export converts PowerPoint slides to JPG, PNG, GIF, WMF and more

Problem

In PowerPoint 2003, when you run a slide show, you aren't seeing the expected annotation pen and other tools that normally appear on a popup toolbar in the lower left corner of the screen.

Solution

First, check your PowerPoint and SlideShow settings:

• Choose Slide Show, Set up Slide Show and make sure that the show's not set to run in Kiosk mode. In Kiosk mode, the Pen and other tools won't appear.
• Choose Tools, Options and check the View tab. Make sure there's a checkmark next to "Show popup toolbar". If this isn't there, the pen and other slide show tools won't be available.

If that doesn't restore the missing tools, your copy of PowerPoint may be missing a few bits. Thanks to PowerPoint MVP Sonia Coleman's research, we now know that if you do a limited install of Office 2003 and don't install the Microsoft Handwriting Component under Office Shared Features, you can't use the pen feature in slide show mode.

To repair the problem,

• Run setup.exe
• Select Add or Remove Features
• On the next dialog check the box for "Choose advanced customization of applications" and click OK.
• Then on the next dialog click on the "+" next to Office Shared Features and click on the icon next to Microsoft Handwriting Component and select "Run from my computer".

By default Handwriting Components are set to "Install on first use" during a typical install, but if the person doing the install has set this feature to "Not Available" the pen tools will never appear.

Search terms:pen,slideshow,show,annotation,drawing

Contents © 1995 - 2008 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.

content authoring & site maintenance by

Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker