During a recent Azure Trainings sessions, many of us ran into couple of issues while doing presentations. This article is about what we ran into and how we solved them.

• Resolution of projector / monitor do not match the preferred resolution of laptop: Typically I work with 1920×1080 resolution or higher. However the maximum resolution supported by the projector was less than this. Before the sessions, changed resolution of my laptop to match the projector resolution, so that all screens get refreshed (including terminal server client) to the right resolution.
• Duplicating the monitor gave issues: It is a very good feature to extend the monitor so that we can see speaker notes in our laptop, while projecting the slide show to attendees. However, this gave issues when we had to switch back to demo etc. I decided to turn off the extend feature and stick to duplicate monitor. Also, set properties in PPTX as following. Note that this may not be recommended, use only if you really need to do this.

  

• Automatic rotation of the laptop screen: I have a Windows 8.1 laptop with touch screen. It automatically goes for screen rotation (just like how Surface would do), when I tilt the laptop and sometime it doesn’t rotate back. I ran into this issue, just when I placed my laptop on the dais before the session. Had to do the following to recover from this:
  • Disable auto-rotation of screen: Open Screen Resolution window, uncheck Allow the screen to auto-rotate and click OK.

    

  • Rotate explicitly to get back to the required position: Right click on desktop and choose Graphics Options > Rotation > Rotate to x Degrees.

    

• Code snippets were not viewable: Used ZoomIt – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/zoomit.aspx

  If you have any feedback or other tips, please write it as a comments to this post. Thanks.