PowerPoint is a great tool for creating figures. Recently, I created a number of relatively large figures that considerably exceeded the slide boundary.

However, if you scroll slightly across the borders of the figure (using the mouse wheel), PowerPoint switches to the previous or next slide, which is really annoying.

It seems taht this feature cannot be switched off in PowerPoint 2013, but, thankfully, I found the following pragmatic solution [1]:

  • Open the Master slide view
  • Place some forms (e.g., rectangles) very far outside the slide area in all four directions.
  • Close the Master slide view

References

[1] Microsoft Community: How to stop Powerpoint from jumping to next/previous slide when editing. https://answers.microsoft.com/thread/38c6d159-5667-4aef-b329-5772ae29ce42