Label control background not transparent (2000)

Topic

New Reply

I’ve just been upgraded from Office 97 to 2000, and am getting to grips with Powerpoint 2000. My gripe is that I can’t get simple text on a slide to have a transparent background. My slide has a slide master with the Clear Day stationery as background, and then I add a label control. I can alter the background in Properties to be transparent, and surely enough, in Design Mode, it LOOKS transparent. But if I show the slide in the slideshow, the label always comes up with the background as opaque! I can alter the background colour of the control in Design (even with background set to transparent) and it doesn’t show in Design Mode, but there it is in Slideshow!!

Anyone any idea why this is? Thanks.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Just to be clear, you’ve set the settings as in the picture?

Reply | Quote

Hi Catharine,

Actually, I’m talking about a label control from the Control Toolbox (the big A icon), not a text box, which works as expected. No, it’s the label control that shows transparent in Design but opaque in Slideshow. Thanks anyway.

Keith

Reply | Quote

Hi, Keith.

I’ve never used a label control in PPT. What exactly is it you’re trying to do?

I did pop one in, though, after reading your message, and, while the “format control” doesn’t give me any options to change the fill or the lines, the label control box itself is transparent, just as you’d expect. I don’t have a Clear Day template to try it on, though. Where did you pull that from?

Wonder if this is a video driver issue? You might see if changing hardware acceleration settings helps. It may not, but it won’t hurt to try. http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00129.htm%5B/url%5D for instructions.

Reply | Quote

Hi Echo,

The Clear Day stationery is part of the Microsoft Common Files in the Sationery folder. I don’t think that’s really significant, just that with a textured background (not just plain white), the opaqueness of the control shows up clearly. It’s not a driver problem, I don’t think, as changing the background colour works properly even though it should be transparent! Thanks anyway.

Keith

Reply | Quote

It does that in version 2002 as well. Dunno why that is. Never noticed it before.

BTW, Catharine, she seems to be talking about a text control element from the Control Toolbox.

Echo… how in the world did you get a label or textbox to be transparent? We’re talking about the ones on the Control Toolbox, now.

LennyJo

Reply | Quote

Hi LennyJo,

You’re right, it’s the label control (the big A icon) in the Control Toolbox I’m talking about, not a textbox which works fine. I used the label instinctively as I’d just been building some User Forms in Excel, where label controls work very well! Seems to have a bug in PowerPoint though. I can’t find any reference in Knowledgebase though. Thanks for verifying it for me though – at least I’m not on my own here!

Keith

Reply | Quote

Now that you have found a limitation, I hope you plan to start using the textboxes rather than label controls. Really, textboxes are designed more for what you are doing anyway. The label and text fields are more for userforms… as you well know.

LennyJo

Reply | Quote

You’re quite right, of course. But as I say, I just reached for the Label as I’d got used to using them from Excel User Forms. It’s still a bug though! And a label can be made clickable, can’t it? Which a textbox can’t. Thanks for your help though.

Keith

Reply | Quote

Sorry, I thought label was just a turn of phrase. Well, you’ll find more formatting options if you open up the VBA editor. But none of them will really solve the problem.
As others have said – textboxes are the way to go. Yes, you can make a textbox clickable. Try Right-Clicking on the textbox and choose Action Settings or Hyperlinks depending on what you want to do.

Cheers

Reply | Quote

I, too, program a lot in Excel and make userforms often. They have their place, but I don’t think they were intended as a display in a slide during a show. They were meant for userforms in PowerPoint. We simply found out they were a workaround for making textboxes that can be typed into during a show. We work with an opaque background without too much bother.

As to the clickable issue, I think some others are getting your terms confused. I’m sure you mean “editable”. You want a box that you can type in during the show, yes? “Clickable”, in PowerPoint lingo, means to be an item one can click during the show to make something happen like a hyperlink or another sort of action. I don’t think that’s what you are after.

LennyJo

Reply | Quote

OK, OK, so we’re all agreed! The Label in the Control Toolbox is not really meant for slides and doesn’t work properly with regard to transparency anyway. Textboxes are still the way to go – and yes, I did mean ‘clickable’ insofar as to the way you program controls for clickability, i.e. it throws you directly into the VBA editor to add code. Action Settings for a textbox require you to specify a program or a hyperlink, it won’t allow you to specify a macro (the option is greyed out), so I can’t get interactivity the way I think I might have been able to, but hey it was only an idea, not a reality! Thanks everyone for helping me with this!

Reply | Quote

it won’t allow you to specify a macro (the option is greyed out)
—————–
You can specify a macro – but the macro has to exist before the dialogue box will show the the option. Check out post 257676 for an example of what you could do with a text box.

HTH

Reply | Quote

Yeah, that’s the one I used, LennyJo. It just came up transparent. I didn’t do anything special.

You know, we saw this recently with a specific calendar control…well, not exactly this, but there was an oddball refresh thing happening with a specific version of the calendar control. I think we finally decided it was a bug with that specific version of that specific control.

Reply | Quote

And to follow up…

If I use a textbox control, it is not transparent. Go figure.

But back to the label control…If I’ve applied a design template to the slide before I add the label control, it’s transparent. If I then change the background color of the slide or the slide color scheme, it’s no longer transparent. If I apply a new design template, it’s also no longer transparent — and in fact, it keeps the color of the original design template’s background. LOL! Definitely an oddball bug.

Oh, you know what? The label control is actually picking up the slide background color from the color scheme. I tried the above using Blue Diagonal POT, which has a gradient background and some graphic element. The label control came out the “bright” blue specified in the color scheme (first color swatch).

Reply | Quote

I’ve been doing it in 2002 and cannot make anything transparent from the control toolbox. They all appear transparent in the slide, but become opaque in the show. Are you doing it in version 2000? Maybe it’s a difference of version.

LennyJo

Reply | Quote

I was using 2000 before, but I get the same results in 2002, i.e., the control takes on the background color designated in the slide color scheme. So it looks transparent (but really isn’t) if the design template has a “flat” background color. If the design template’s got a gradient as a background, then no, the control doesn’t look transparent in either 2000 or 2002.

Reply | Quote

OK, we’re in sync now. It won’t render a true transparent, although in some cases it can be faked. Cool.

Thanks,
LennyJo

Reply | Quote