Problem with projector image

[Cheerful]

First, thank you to this community for getting me past my last hurdle. Here's my next problem in a long line of unending issues...

I get announcement slides to start the presentation with from the secretary. I copy and paste them into my file. The announcement slides each change every few weeks. I'm not sure what sources our secretary is using for the slides. Recently, we started running into an issue where the entire presentation was suddenly too wide for the screen. After playing around with the presentation, I realized that the width of the presentation changed depending on which slide the presentation began on. If I start the presentation with one of my slides and back up to the beginning of the presentation, it usually works properly. I thought to check the resolution of her slides, but they were all the same as mine. I can't pinpoint any one slide that might be causing the problem; seems to be more her file in general. Any thoughts? My last idea is that she uses two monitors at her computer. We use a monitor and then have the projector mirror the monitor. The problem never shows up on the computer monitor, just the projector. Thanks in advance for any help!

[Johnnycat]

Some more info will be helpful...

What is the file you are working with?

What software are you using to project with?

[Cheerful]

Please keep in mind that I'm not being paid to do this, so my computer resume probably isn't what it should be for this job. I'll try my best to answer any questions.

The church's computers use PowerPoint 2007. The files are saved as .pptx. At the moment, I don't know what version of windows they're running. I'm not aware of any specific software that the projector might be using. It just mirrors the image on the monitor (or, more precisely, it mirrored the image until this started happening). As a side note, I'd like to eventually change the computer over to use dual displays so that we can use PowerPoint's presenter view and have a smoother service. The computer doesn't even currently recognize the projector as one of it's displays in the control panel, though, so I'm at a loss as to how to do that.

[Johnnycat]

If you are using PowerPoint (I am too), when you import the graphics to a new slide just resize the image to fit the slide size.

[Cheerful]

I'm not just importing the graphics, though. I copy the whole slides that she has already put together, usually by choosing "new slide/reuse slides." Once her slides are in my presentation, the entire presentation is sometimes distorted, depending on which slide we start the presentation on. As if that's not strange enough, it's only stretched on the projector screen which means that I can't even tell if there's a problem or not from home. I don't think that it could be as easy as resizing an image.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Did the secretary recently go to a wide screen monitor?

I'm guessing your projector is 4x3 (1024x768 or 800x600 pixels), not wide screen?

Once you load the slide show in Power point, go to Slide Show, Set up slide show.

On the Set up slide show window, under performance, set the resolution to whatever your pojector wants it set to, as I said, probably 1024x768.

That should get you in the right direction. Fiddle with those settings until it looks right.

[Cheerful]

Right, it's not widescreen. I think it is 1024x768. I'll have to find out what she uses on her computer. I do know that they're changing the server over and I think that she may have lost a lot of her computer settings recently. I can't say for sure, though, whether that happened before or after these problems started to occur. Hopefully I have time between services on Sunday to fiddle around with some settings and see if I can get it worked out. If things go the way I suspect that they might, I'll be back on here after Sunday reporting any new frustrations. Is it too much to think that a computer program should actually do what you want it to do?