PPT2000: Colors Appear Wrong On Low Color Displays

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 for Windows

SUMMARY

The following information describes how many colors (and what color depths) are available in Microsoft PowerPoint and what happens when a presentation contains more colors than can be displayed accurately given a systems display settings.

MORE INFORMATION

Internally, PowerPoint stores color information for every object using 24- bit (16.7 million colors) color definition. Thus, if you insert a graphic that contains 16.7 million colors, and you display it using a 24-bit display driver, you see all the colors.

However, when you run a PowerPoint slide show on a system that has a 256- color display driver, PowerPoint performs Palette Management. This means that PowerPoint sends a palette to the display driver that contains the 256 colors that it needs the most at that one time. PowerPoint can send a different palette to the display driver whenever it deems it necessary (usually when changing a slide).

As long as you are running a color depth of greater than 256 colors, you won't have to worry about running out of colors. If you are running a color depth of 256 colors, and you have enough different graphics and gradients on a single slide so that the slide requires more than 256 separate colors to display, you may experience color loss, with or without an error message.

REFERENCES

For further information, click the Windows Start button, click Help, click the Search tab, then search on the following words:

color depth
color palette, changing
color, changing the number of

Additional query words: 9.00 ppt9 power point powerpnt winppt

Keywords          : 
Version           : WINDOWS:2000
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbinfo 

Last Reviewed: June 28, 1999