Office Live Preview under Terminal Services
Posted By technomummy on June 18, 2009
Extensive googling got me as far as relating this problem to the display settings. Specifically. right-click on My Computer and go to the Advanced tab, then click on the Settings button under Performance. The option for Smooth-scroll list boxes has to be ticked for Live Preview to work, either explicitly as part of Custom Settings or as part of Adjust for Best Performance. So far so good – however, I found that whenever I changed these settings, they were not held, so that next time the user logged in the display settings reverted back and Live Preview was unavailable again.
Then came the hard work – was it set in Group Policy? No. Was it possible to fix it using Group Policy? No. Was it possible to nail down the registry settings involved? No. Googling pointed me to some settings, but I still couldn’t get a handle on how to force these settings every time the user logged in.
Finally, the answer – it’s not a server-side setting at all, it’s set in the RDP client! Specifically, in the connection settings for the Remote Desktop client, go to Options and the Experience tab, and make sure that Menu and Window animation is checked!
And voila! Enable Live Preview is checked in Office 2007 using Remote Desktop to a terminal server!
I am the proud mother of a four-year daughter, and have been working in IT for over 20 years.
What if the user is not using Remote Desktop to a terminal server?
Whether it’s remote desktop or not, it comes back to a limitation somewhere on your display settings. Have you checked the setting for smooth-scroll list boxes (My Computer-Advanced-Settings-Performance)?
Hi Technomummy,
I have same problem, but only on my account. It used to work, but I noticed several weeks ago it stopped. My wife’s account and a “guest” account both have the option to check/uncheck live preview in Word, Excel etc, and live preview still works for them. But with my account the option is grayed out and I cannot use live preview. I have ensured the “smooth-scroll list boxes” is selected (in fact all options are selected via “Adjust for best appearance” being selected – and it sticks!). I’m using Windows XP Pro SP3. RDP is NOT installed or used here.
The problem is obviously an option on my own account only, but after a lot of looking around and testing, I cannot find the option(s) that need to be changed to get it working for me again. Any further ideas, please?
Many thanks
Hi Ken412 –
No, I don’t know. My experiences lead me to think it’s still related to display settings, I can only suggest obvious things like changing the setting to something else, rebooting, then changing it back to “Adjust for Best Appearance”, or trying the custom option to set that one explicitly. In Display terms, is there anything else obvious different between your account and the ones that work? If it was me though, I’d probably just create a new user and run with that, it’s a pain but would probably still be quicker than trying to track this one down.
One other thing, but only for the brave at heart – you could take a look at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, I would suspect that there is a difference somewhere in there between your account and the ones that work. You could either export them both and compare them, or export from one that works and import into the one that doesn’t (but obviously that is risky, and comes with the usual caveats about editing the registry….)
More specifically, the registry entry for this is apparently HKCU\Control panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask , see http://nystrom.nl/tech/microsoft/microsoft_things.html
Thanks
Technomummy.