This morning Adam Machanic (blog | twitter) asked the following question on Twitter:

A very interesting question, as I was wondering this myself at my last session. I was presenting the slides using presenter mode, which means the projector screen is an extension of your desktop. PowerPoint does this automatically. However, when exiting the slideshow I would like to go back to duplicated screens, as it’s much easier to do demos when your screen is duplicated instead of extended. I have heard other presenters with the same issue as well.

A quick search with my favorite search engine led me to a Q&A on the Microsoft website. Apparently all you have to do is add a registry setting (of course, we’re still using Windows). At [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\PowerPoint\Options] the following DWORD value has to be added: “RestoreTopology”=dword:00000001. The site I linked to has an easy update script that you can use.

Adam has already tested it and it works perfectly!