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Just a short blog post today with a quick tip on how to use PowerPoint Live and importantly the Teams Presenter View. In the last couple of months I’d need another pair of hands to count how many times a presenter has not managed to share the correct view of their PowerPoint presentation. Either they are sharing their desktop and have not gone into the slide show or they don’t know where that pesky button to switch to presenter view is, There is a tip at the bottom of this blog as to why you may not be able to find this elusive button. The audience gets the below view instead of the nice shiny presentation you’ve worked hours on, and they can even see the really important notes you’ve put into the presentation but don’t actually want the audience to see.

So it’s not the end of the world but it’s really easy to give a professional looking presentation with some brilliant features all built into Teams.

Below is a quick guide to using PowerPoint live in Teams. There are a number of advantages to using PowerPoint live. PowerPoint Live in Teams gives both the presenter and audience an inclusive and engaging experience, combining the best parts of presenting in PowerPoint with the connection and collaboration of a Microsoft Teams meeting.

When you’re the presenter, you have a unique view that lets you control your presentation while staying engaged with your audience, seeing people’s video, raised hands, reactions, and chat as needed.

And if you’re an audience member, you can interact with the presentation and personalize your viewing experience with captions, high contrast slides, and slides translated into your native language. You can even click on links within the presentation which is super helpful.

Present your slides

  • If you’re already in a Teams meeting, select Share and then under the PowerPoint Live section, choose the PowerPoint file you’re wanting to present. If you don’t see the file in the list, select Browse OneDrive or Browse my computer.
  • If your presentation is already open in PowerPoint for Windows or Mac, go to the file and select Present in Teams.
  • If you’re in PowerPoint for the web, select Present > Present in Teams.

Your slides will appear in the Teams meeting, with your Notes next to them.

Navigating through your slides

There are a few options here depending on your preference

  • Use the navigation arrows to go forward and backward.
  • Use the thumbnail strip to jump ahead or backwards.
  • Select Go to slide to see a grid view of all slides in the presentation. Select one to jump to it.

You can even get some awesome new clickers that integrate with Teams and PowerPoint Live, like the new Microsoft Presenter+ (HINT if you were wondering what to get me for Christmas just saying…)

Benefits for the Presenter

One of the major benefits of using PowerPoint Live is the extra features you can use all why still presenting your deck for the audience. You can toggle chat off and on to keep engaged with your audience. You get to see the audience reactions and hand raises. You can change the Layout of your presentation and choose how your live camera feed appears in your presentation, like Standout or Cameo. It helps the audience read your non-verbal cues and keeps them engaged. You can easily use the Laser pointer, Pen, Highlighter, or Eraser.

Benefits for the Audience

The audience gets a number of great benefits form this and they can interact with your presentation without affecting anyone else.

  1. Use the navigation arrows to move around to different slides. Go back to check on information you may have missed or go forward to preview upcoming slides. You can always get back to where your presenter is by selecting Sync to Presenter. Don’t worry if you’ve got a big reveal later in your presentation and you don’t want those curious peeps to go spoiling it for themselves you can turn this off using the Private view toggle to turn it off.
  1. Click any hyperlink on slides to get more context right away, this is such a helpful feature and will stop some of the famous PowerPoint bingo phrase of “Don’t worry we’ll share the deck after the presentation so you can get to all these links)
  2. Interact with videos on slides to adjust the volume or jump to a timestamp and consume it at your own pace.
  3. Use a screen reader to get full access to the slide content.
  4. Translate the slides into one of 19 languages. Select More options > Translate slides and then choose a language.
     
  1. Switch to a high contrast view to make the slides easier to view if you have low vision. Select More options > View slides in high contrast. Really useful and important to make your presentations more inclusive.
  2. Your viewing experience will be at a higher fidelity, letting you see crisp text and smooth animations. PowerPoint Live also requires significantly less network bandwidth than typical sharing, making it the best option when network connectivity is a problem. Really important when your kids are at home streaming YouTube on 5 different devices and playing Fortnite

Important stuff to remember

  • PowerPoint Live is not supported in Teams live events.
  • Presenter view is hidden by default for small screen devices but can be turned on by selecting More options below the current slide and then Show presenter view (or by selecting the sharing window and then pressing Ctrl+Shift+x).
  • Meetings recordings won’t capture any videos, animations, or annotation marks in the PowerPoint Live session.
  • When you share from Teams, the PowerPoint Live section lists the most recent files you’ve opened or edited in your team SharePoint site or your OneDrive. If you select one of these files to present, all meeting participants will be able to view the slides during the meeting. Their access permissions to the file outside of the meeting won’t change.
  • If you select Browse and choose to present a PowerPoint file that hasn’t been uploaded to Teams before, it will get uploaded as part of the meeting. If you’re presenting in a channel meeting, the file is uploaded to the Files tab in the channel, where all team members will have access to it. If you’re presenting in a private meeting, the file is uploaded to your OneDrive, where only the meeting participants will be able to access it.

Summary

If you didn’t know about PowerPoint live, now you do. Or if you were sharing your screen instead of using PowerPoint Live then definitely give it a go for all the reasons above but if you’re still set on using the old school method then you might need to make sure presenter view is enabled by doing the below.

  • You can go to Slide Show tab > Set Up Slide Show > Under Slide show monitor, select your “Primary screen” and check Presenter View

Personally, if it’s an important presentation I like to be at my home office with my ultrawide monitor so I can make use of multiple screens.