PowerPoint Live - Presenting Remotely #10

The Microsoft Teams team have been adding new features and options to the Teams experience every month for the past few years and one of them is so useful for remote presentations that it warrants an update to my recommendations of how to present remotely. If you're interested in further ideas you may want to visit my previous posts at the below link but PowerPoint Live is so well integrated and provides so many upsides that it has become my primary way of presenting via Microsoft Teams. Let's see why! This article is part of a series on remote presenting, see the full collection at?Presenting Remotely – A Collection of Articles – LevInProgress

It's easy to start from within PowerPoint: all you have to do is press the "Present in Team" button in PowerPoint and the rest will be nicely taken care of in the background. Two things to note: you have to be already in the meeting for this to work otherwise you will get a polite message reminding you and you need to be able to upload the file into the tenant you are presenting into as PowerPoint will upload the presentation to a central location and will feed it through something like PowerPoint online into the Team meeting (I have yet to find out where it uploads if it weren't on OneDrive already - let me know in the comments if you know).

Present in Teams button in PowerPoint

I see my notes, but I'm the only one who sees them: using PowerPoint Live inside a Teams meeting instantly solves a number of the issues that we were trying to solve in my earlier articles: you can present while seeing your audience and also your notes, you have the opportunity to use a pointer or annotate you slides (draw in ink, highlight etc.) and you can also play embedded video in a consistent way to your audience.

The presenter's view in Teams

What the audience sees

I can annotate the presentation: use inking, a laser pointer or highlights to make the presentation much more lively and help your audience follow your points across a more complicated slide. You can use this not only to focus attention but also to break the visual monotony of your delivery - it helps with audience engagement.

Annotation controls

It's easy to hand over to others: because the presentation is driven from a central location, all it takes for someone else to take over is to press the "Take over as presenter" button at the top and they can keep presenting from where you left off. No more "Can I have the next slide please" moments! The slides can be even driven from a mobile Teams client so even if your co-presenters are in a remote, mobile situation, they can still drive their own slides. (Of course this freedom comes with some risks - see my final paragraph on controls to mitigate those). When someone takes over, you lose your annotation controls and the visibility of the notes as you become one of the audience but don't let that surprise you - your fellow presenter taking over is enjoying those controls now. It is also worth pointing it out to them that they will not see their notes until they become the active presenter - some people can get very nervous thinking that they will need to do without their notes.

How an attendee can take control

Video viewing is consistent for the audience: one of the best aspects of using this presentation mode is that the embedded videos will play for each participant in the highest quality permitted by their bandwidth but nevertheless consistent with all other participants' experience. As the presenter, you should make sure that the video is embedded into your deck and present as if you were in the same room. It should just work. You still should be mindful of the potential bandwidth constraints of your audience and use a video with appropriate size/bandwidth/resolution/bitrate but you will not be constrained to screen sharing's 15fps any more.

If you want to stay in control: finally, if you use this presentation mode, you should be aware of two ways of keeping the control over your audience and how they access the presentation: there is built-in feature that lets the audience page ahead (and back) in your presentation. The idea for this is you can let them preview content or go back to a previous slide to catch-up on something without stopping your flow. However in a formal presentation you may want to prevent this and you may have moments of surprise in upcoming slides. You can turn the audience's ability to wander around the slides by using the button with an eye icon on it. This also helps with consistency as people who are not completely familiar with this feature tend to click ahead and then forget to "Get back to Presenter's view" and they get stuck on a slide they have navigated to.

How to prevent paging ahead

The other way the audience can accidentally or deliberately disrupt the presentation is by taking over as presenters and preventing you from driving the slides or seeing your notes. You can see this very quickly and take back control as the view will change in front of your eyes but if this happens at a critical moment then you may lose precious seconds before you can control again so it may be worthwhile to set up presenters and attendees formally ahead of the meeting. In an internal environment all invitees will end up having presenter permissions in a meeting which is useful for collaboration - people can quickly jump to share their screens or add new people to the meeting but there are other meetings where setting up formally who are the presenters and making everyone else be an attendee is helpful to maintain control. You can do that the the "Meeting Options" page at the bottom of the invitation and designate who the presenters are. Remember, if you need to quickly "presenter someone up" during a meeting, you can always right-click them in the attendee list and do it there too.

How to access meeting options

Have you used PowerPoint Live in Teams yet? Let me know what you found in the comments!