No more “next slide please” with Microsoft Teams PowerPoint Live Presenter Mode

One of the great meeting features of Microsoft Teams is PowerPoint Live Presenter mode. For me, the killer feature is that anyone can “Take control” of presenting the deck seamlessly.

In my opinion, it really breaks the flow of a presentation for the presenter to keep prompting someone with “next slide please”. It became a running joke with the UK Government updates that they were constantly prompting for “next slide please”

PowerPoint Live Presenter Mode won’t be suitable for every meeting type, as you may not want everyone in the meeting to have the power to “take control” but for internal “All Hands” type meetings, where multiple presenters have a couple of slides each to present, each presenter can just “take control” in turn and drive the slides.

Using PowerPoint Live Presenter Mode

Firstly someone uploads the PowerPoint deck. Teams will show recent decks that the user has edited to make it easy to find the right deck to upload, but you can also browse OneDrive or the local computer.

The person uploading will be the initial “deck presenter”; they will initially have control to move the deck forward for everyone in the meeting

 

Presenter Options in PowerPoint Live Presenter Mode

The presenter gets a nice view of the overall deck and the current slide you are presenting. You will also see slide notes. This is so useful if you are presenting from a single screen. You can also see all the chat while presenting. This tight integration with PowerPoint is something that steps Microsoft Teams apart from other online meeting platforms.

You can also use the new “standout” mode (not sure about that name, I prefer “weatherman mode”) to appear over the slides which can help promote engagement. Note, standout mode person overlaid on the slides won’t come through on a recording, The recording will show normal bottom right video.

PowerPoint Live Attendee Features

Attendees can even personally move forwards and backwards in the deck, this is useful if they want to see what is coming up

the presenter can turn off this feature if they prefer

Attendees can also personally put the slides into “high contrast mode” for improved accessibility. This only affects their view of the slides.

 

“Take Control” – the “next slide please” killer

Often in meetings with multiple presenters, before PowerPoint Live, one person presents the deck for the whole meetings, probably via screen sharing, and as the current talker asks that person to move the slides forward; “Next slide please”. Saving the pain of one person screens sharing, then another, then another.

With PowerPoint Live, In the meeting, everyone other than the current person presenting the slides will see the slide the presenter is presenting, but they also have a “Take Control” button.

The person that presses that button then gets the presenter view and control, and the original presenter gets prompted that someone has taken over. They can see who took over as the current presenter is shown in the bottom left.

This allows seamless transfer of presenters with no interruption for the “viewers” of the presentation for a much slicker meeting.

See the banner prompt notifying the previous presenter that someone has taken over presenting and in the bottom left I can see it’s Tom Morgan now presenting

Note, PowerPoint Live won’t work well for meetings where presenters need to “screen share” outside of a single PowerPoint deck. If someone does drop the presentation to share their screen, or for any other reason, when the original deck uploader shares the deck again, it prompts them with the option to resume at the same point in the deck.