Pen doesn't work during slide show in PowerPoint 2003

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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

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