Powerpoint screen goes randomly blank

[smurfomatic]

One of our teachers has this issue with Powerpoint (we're using 2010 - I know it's out of date, the plan was to move to using Google completely, now it seems we're off to Office 365) where the screen suddenly goes blank - no sidebar, no slide window - unless you do something like search for clipart and it'll come back!

 

Any ideas? I'm thinking as a standard approach just to reinstall Office and see if that helps.

 

[tigerstar]

Graphics driver issue is the usual suspect here - PowerPoint uses graphics acceleration for slideshow and editing, and on some devices it can act weirdly. Try disabling it in Options > Advanced > Display > Disable Hardware Graphics Acceleration. If this causes the problem to go away, try updating/changing the graphics driver and re-enabling.