SOLVED

Preview exited, now GA: PowerPoint Presenter View in Teams

Microsoft

Description

Wish you could get some extra help behind the scenes while presenting in a Teams meeting? Check out our new Presenter View! Once you select a PowerPoint file from the Teams Share Tray, Presenter View is opened automatically. You can see the current slide, the slide notes, and a thumbnail strip of all the slides in the deck for easy ad-hoc slide navigation.

 

presenter view NEW.png

 

This view is completely behind the scenes. It’s private to the presenter in control. Your audience can only see your current slide (highlighted in the big red box), or the slide that they choose to navigate to (if audience navigation is not locked by you).

If you have a co-presenter for the meeting, when that person clicks “Take Control”, Presenter View will be opened for him or her immediately, while you’ll be switched to the normal audience view without the slide notes and the thumbnail strip.

 

Flighting status

Completed, fully available in R3.6.

 

How to enable

No setup needed. This is a view private to the presenter in control. Once the feature is available to you, you will see it if sharing a PowerPoint during a Teams meeting. Under Share tray > PowerPoint, choose a file and you will see the slide notes and the thumbnails of all of the slides.

Note: If you need information about enabling the public preview itself, see “Enable the public preview for Teams” below.

 

 

Microsoft 365 workloads and dependencies

Product, workload, or area

Dependency (Yes/No)

If yes, version requirements and other dependencies

Exchange

No

 

Sharepoint, files

No

 

Skype for Business

No

 

Outlook add-in

No

 

Azure AD

No

 

OneDrive

No

 

Office

No

 

 

Supported clients and platforms

 

Windows 10

macOS

iOS

Android

Linux

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

Edge

Internet Explorer

Yes

Yes

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Known issues

  • Control Bar: if the navigation buttons on the Teams U-bar disappears during your sharing, you'll have to leave the meeting and rejoin.
  • High Contrast theme: Presenter View UI may not update to high contrast mode, if you change Teams theme to High Contrast during an ongoing sharing session.

Known limitations

  • Only available in the “new meeting experience” at the moment (Teams Settings > General > Application)
  • Not available in Teams web app yet

 

Enable your Teams client for the public preview 

 

  1. First, IT admins need to set an update policy that turns on Show preview features. Learn how at Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.  
  2. Users then choose to join the public preview individually. See Get early access to new Teams features - Office Support (microsoft.com) for instructions. 

Summary of public preview features

For a history of features in the Office and Teams public previews, see Release Notes Current Channel (Preview) - Office release notes | Microsoft Docs.

Send us your feedback 

Got feedback on features in the public preview or other areas of Teams? Let us know straight from Teams via Help Give feedback 

 

 

Thank you,

Preview Team @Emily Kirby 

Quality & Customer Obsession, Microsoft Teams

66 Replies

Since you can't disable this, any meeting room in the world, where people are still connecting their laptops to an HDMI and presenting in the room, is now forced to watch the presentation in the top-right corner of the screen while perusing the presenters private notes. 

 

I'm managing an estate of 200 meeting rooms like this, and I'm so exited I could chew my own head off.

 

Not exactly thought through, is it?

best response confirmed by Emily Kirby (Microsoft)
Microsoft Verified Best Answer
Solution

For everyone asking for a way to toggle presenter view, thank you for your feedback! We feel your pain and are addressing it with a quick mitigation via a keyboard shortcut for now: try clicking in the slide area, and press "Ctrl+Shift+X". The notes and thumbnail strip should be closed. Using the same keyboard shortcut key again can bring the presenter view back. This update will be available in a day or two.

 

At the same time, we are also working on hiding the presenter view by default on devices with small screen. It will be available soon.

 

Again, thank you for being a part of public preview and helping us make the product better!

This is great news and thank you for getting on to this so quickly!
Awesome! Thank you guys.

I want to say thanks however it has taken a week for you to recognise this problem in the first place and secondly this feature is live, people here are not in the public preview so thanking people for being part of it is a nice way of trying to sweep this under the rug instead of apologising for how this went live when it shouldn't of and how you will make sure things like this don't happen again.

Pleased by the rapid response and looking forward to passing on the shortcut. However, a simple toggle in the control bar would be better than changing the default based on screen size. Our staff have multiple monitors and projectors to teach students in class and online simultaneously.

@Emily Kirby 

 

This certainly was a quick response and is greatly appreciated! However, a toggle switch would still be more beneficial than asking end users to remember a keyboard shortcut. Where a user may be working across a device with a larger screen and a device with a smaller screen, having a varied user experience forced between the two could cause frustration. Having a toggle slider would alleviate this.

I didn't like this feature. Makes it dificult to read what is beeing presentend on the slide. I prefer the traditional mode. How can I unable this?

 

Thanks

I have on good authority that there’s a button coming, but until then CTRL-SHIFT-X is your friend.

@Kaushal Mehta (LYNC) 

 

Hi,

 

Very excited to suddenly have the preview available and see my notes on screen yesterday - complete auto cue experience. But then today, it has disappeared and I just have the PowerPoint main screen and can't see anything to press to bring my notes and slide preview panels back. How to do it please?

I have used this feature, but when I select "Use Computer Sound" in the new Presenter Mode, no sound comes through.  It seems like it does not recognize imbedded sound nor does it recognize video imbedded on a slide.  This is the only thing preventing us from using this.  Do you have any advise for this issue?

 

Thank you!

@Megi-1912 Hi I found this answer on another forum and it works.

 

ADMINAlex (Teams Engineering, Microsoft Teams) responded  ·  Feb 16, 2021

Thank you for your feedback! We have addressed your usability feedback with a quick mitigation via a keyboard shortcut for now: try clicking in the slide area, and press “Ctrl+Shift+X”. The notes and thumbnail strip should be closed. Using the same keyboard shortcut key again can bring the presenter view back. This update is now available.

At the same time, we are also working on hiding the presenter view by default on devices with small screens. We will keep you posted when the update is available.

Again, thank you for giving the feedback and helping us make the product better!

@Emily Kirby 

Ironically i am looking to use this feature, i have public preview enabled but i do not see the notes and thumbnails.  I have the latest version, i have tried using the Ctrl+Shift+X thinking that maybe this was off, but this hasn't worked.  Is there other reasons this might not be working ?

Hi @KennyJcc, Interesting.. Did this work for you before? What device are you on? (Mac, Windows?) 

Yes it worked. For me and some other colleagues. All of us are using windows. My colleagues that are using Mac they just maximized the MS Teams video call window and the notes just showed up.

@Emily Kirby 
This is on a windows running win10, laptop. I haven’t seen this reported by anyone else and so seems quite strange behaviour. It almost feels like the functionality is there but not showing.  I don’t know if this is normal behaviour but if I log on Teams via the web the functionality works as expected, just not using the Teams desktop app.  

@KennyJcc 

They mentioned automatically disabling this feature for smaller screens with lower resoloutions. If you've got 12" laptops with 720p displays, that may be the cause.

Well, this is weird. Yesterday, I was able to toggle the presenter view on and off with Ctrl+Shift+X, but it seems to have stopped working. I am working (teaching) on a laptop, but I have to say that this function was really helpful, although the slides appeared quite small. In some classes, being able to view the following slides was very useful for me (and the notes also, in some cases). Being able to control the flow of the presentation, instead of searching for the slide that I wanted to move to is essential for the experience of both the students and the instructor. And since I was able to switch the presenter view on and off at will, there was no problem with the size of the slides. And I really do not like sharing the powerpoint window or -worse- the whole screen , since it just complicates things. I guess that just adding the option to use this feature or not would solve this problem.