Sunday, September 27, 2009

PowerPoint's Presenter View with Only One Monitor

As much as I love Linux, I occasionally boot into Windows to use MS PowerPoint whenever I need to give a talk.  One of the reasons I like to use PowerPoint so much is because of its "Presenter View" mode, which brings up private presentation notes on your laptop's monitor while you give your talk with your slides displayed on a projector.  Unfortunately, Microsoft made a major blunder with this feature: they don't allow you to enable it when you're using only one screen.  So if you're going out of town to give a presentation, good luck practicing your talk using the presenter view while you're in your hotel room (unless you fancy lugging a spare monitor with you).  The absence of this feature is so baffling that I suspect this might have been a case of the famed Microsoft Shotgun making its way to the Office Team where they happily used it to shoot themselves in the foot.  Fortunately, I have found a hack that you can use to get around this omission.
The trick is to get Windows to think that you have a second monitor connected to it, which then in turn allows you to enable presenter view in PowerPoint.  When it comes to doing so, there is good news and there is bad news.  The bad news is that after installing various extra graphics card drivers, I was unable to fool Windows into thinking that my laptop was connected to a second monitor using software only.  The good news is that I was finally able to do so using a single, easy to carry, 75 ohm resister.
To get started, obtain a few 75 ohm resisters from your local RadioShack (spares are good as they are easy to lose). They should be color coded with four stripes: violate, green, black, and finally gold.  Then, simply plug each of the two ends of one of your resistors into holes 1 and 6 of your laptop's VGA jack (see image below), and your graphics card will think that you plugged in a second monitor.

VGA Jack - Pins 1 and 6 are shown in red.

All that remains is to enable the fake monitor by extending your desktop to this "monitor" in Display Properties and finally to enable presenter view in PowerPoint.  Here's a picture of my resistor in action. It's not the prettiest setup, but it works.


Here's a photograph showing the resistor and Windows Vista configured to use the "two" monitors:


Please note that you should try this at your own risk.  I take no responsibility if this trick damages your computer or computer data in anyway.

2 comments:

  1. This didn't work for me. I followed your instructions, but my Toshiba Laptop using Vista didn't recognize anything when I attached the resistor to the VGA Jack. Any ideas?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just tried 75 ohm resistor in pin 2 and pin 7, instead of 1 and 6, and it worked!

    ReplyDelete